ReinyDays
Gold Member
That is one facet of the debate. And it is not settled, so your confidence is...curious. No, they may very well be actual "particles", as real as any other.
The Higgs boson is the last of the elementary particles to be discovered ... using the Standard Model ... there may well be no more ... keep in mind the Standard Model has proven to be robust again and again and again ... nothing we've observed in the universe seems to contradict it's validity ... when looking for the Higgs boson, we knew exact what to expect, and where to expect it ... it's properties, it's behaviors, it's qualities ... all these things were (correctly) predicted by the Standard Model ...
We will need a new model of these elementary particles ... something that gives us the 17 we have in hand plus room for more ... gravitons, dark matter, pheons, etc etc etc ... otherwise we're just randomly looking hoping to catch sight of something the Standard Model doesn't predict ... perhaps we don't need this information, but it sure would be a BIG help when building a machine to detect them ...
Does this explain my confidence? ... sometimes there is only so much to learn, and then there's no more to learn after that ... sometimes ...