The Standard Model works too well

An enormous apparatus for scientific research is finding only what was expected.  This bothers scientists.

Our chief consultant writes:

There is something called the Standard Model of Particle Physics.  It is a highly mathematical description of the zoo of subatomic particles and how they interact, put together over the course of the twentieth century by a lot of highly intelligent and creative people.  As it happens, none of us here at Five Colors is a specialist in the field, but we’ve been introduced to parts of it.  (Somehow infinity subtracted from infinity gets the right answer to ten decimal places; which has always impressed us.)

There is something called the Large Hadron Collider.  This is a very large, expensive piece of apparatus built to investigate particle physics.  By a process I won’t go into in detail here, it creates new particles by smashing together old particles at high energy.  The LHC works at higher energies than any similar machine, making particles that no other machine can make.  In this way it has found, experimentally, several things predicted by the Standard Model but not seen elsewhere.  This is, of course, a success.

But it has not seen anything unexpected.  All of its discoveries have been part of the Standard Model.  And the scientists who work in the field are getting discouraged by that fact.  They were hoping that something new would turn up, something that would give a clue about physics “beyond the Standard Model.”  If this sounds as if they’re wishing that their system would fail, well, that’s true!  The most interesting things in science, as well as the most profound advances, come from the unexpected.

This is not how Science is seen by many non-scientists, especially paradoxers.  The active pursuit of failure, pushing a theory as far as you can hoping to find its limits, contrasts sharply with the picture of an elite group jealously defending an agreed orthodoxy.  That picture is a better fit to certain other areas of human activity.