Thirty years of the Standard Model

This fall is the thirtieth anniversary of the "November Revolution", the shift in particle physics that happened as a result of the discovery of the J/Ψ particle, which fulfilled the clearest testable prediction of the emerging quark model and electroweak theory.

Ever since then, particle physics has been to some extent the victim of its own success. There has been a pretty stable picture, called the Standard Model, of what the most fundamental well-established laws of physics are, and new experimental discoveries have been embellishments around the edges: the third generation of fundamental particles, the not-very-surprising discovery of neutrino mass, the narrowing of ranges in which the Higgs particle or something like it might be found. It's easy to tweak the Standard Model to incorporate this stuff without it seeming terribly forced. There are ideas out beyond the edge of current observation—grand unified theories, supersymmetry, strings, quantum gravity—but the connection to things we can measure hasn't arisen, except in a gradual winnowing of the simplest and most outrageous ideas through negative results.

Which is why the phenomena of dark matter and especially dark energy are so exciting. This is clearly fundamental physics way, way beyond the Standard Model, and not off in some unobservable realm but accessible, at least in its gravitational effects, to telescopes. We might be escaping beyond the Standard Model at last.