Word: models
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...currents to the folding of protein molecules, that cannot be understood without radical improvements in our methods of calculation. They will provide plenty of interesting continued employment for theorists and experimenters for the foreseeable future. But no new freestanding scientific principles are needed to understand these phenomena. The standard model provides all the fundamental principles we need...
There is one force, though, that is not covered by the standard model: the force of gravity. Einstein's general theory of relativity gives a good account of gravitation at ordinary distances, and if we like, we can tack it on to the standard model. But serious mathematical inconsistencies turn up when we try to apply it to particles separated by tiny distances--distances about 10 million billion times smaller than those probed in the most powerful particle accelerators...
Even apart from its problems in describing gravitation, however, the standard model in its present form has too many arbitrary features. Its equations contain too many constants of nature--such as the masses of the elementary particles and the strength of the fundamental units of electric charge--that are there for no other reason than that they seem to work. In writing these equations, physicists simply plugged in whatever values made the predictions of the theory agree with experimental results...
There are reasons to believe that these two problems are really the same problem. That is, we think that when we learn how to make a mathematically consistent theory that governs both gravitation and the forces already described by the standard model, all those seemingly arbitrary properties will turn out to be what they are because this is the only way that the theory can be mathematically consistent...
Even without new experiments, it may be possible to judge a final theory by whether it explains all the apparently arbitrary aspects of the standard model. But there are explanations and explanations. We would not be satisfied with a theory that explains the standard model in terms of something complicated and arbitrary, in the way astronomers before Copernicus explained the motions of planets by piling epicycles upon epicycles...