The Standard Model is the prime example. Considered the crowning achievement of twentieth-century particle physics because of its capacity to accurately describe the wealth of data collected by particle accelerators worldwide, the Standard Model is a quantum field theory containing fifty-seven distinct quantum fields (the fields corresponding to the electron, the neutrino, the photon, and the various kinds of quarks—the up-quark, the down-quark, the charm-quark, and so on). Undeniably, the Standard Model is tremendously successful, but many physicists feel that a truly fundamental
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