John Carlos Baez on Nostr: I've been thinking about why the Standard Model of particle physics is the way it is. ...

I've been thinking about why the Standard Model of particle physics is the way it is. This may be a waste of time, since there's been little progress on this since the 1970s. But there are lots of patterns worth thinking about. Here's the kind of thing I mean:

There are 3 generations of matter particles in the Standard Model.

Each generation contains a total of 32 particles - if we count the 3 colors of each quark as different particles, and if we believe in right-handed neutrinos, as I do.

We can divide these 32 particles in various ways:

• There are 16 'fermions', namely quarks and leptons, and 16 'antifermions', namely antiquarks and antileptons:

32 = 16 + 16

• Among the 16 fermions, 8 are left-handed and 8 are right-handed. Ditto for the antifermions:

32 = [8 + 8] + [8 + 8]

• Among each group of 8, 6 are quarks (or antiquarks) and 2 are leptons (or antileptons):

32 = [(6 + 2) + (6 + 2)] + [(6 + 2) + (6 + 2)[

But now a twist: the 8 left-handed fermions behave very differently from the right-handed ones! The left-handed ones come in pairs that turn into each other while emitting or absorbing a W boson, while the right-handed ones do NOT. For antifermions this pattern is reversed, so we can say

32 = [(2×3 + 2×1) + ((3+3) + (1+1))] + [((3+3) + (1+1)) + (2×3 + 2×1)]

where 2×3 means 6 quarks grouped in pairs that interact in this particular way, while 3+3 means 6 quarks grouped in pairs that don't, and so on.

I believe all these are clues. I feel it's almost as if nature is trying to point us to the beautiful structure from which all these patterns inevitably follow.

A lot of particle physicists disagree: they seem to think this is random junk.