RE: Beyond the Standard Model of particle physics - a wild wild world…
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I was going to say that I can't understand how something that has no mass can interact with anything, but then you said neutrinos actually do have a mass! If I understand correctly.
Is there any physical particle that exists without having a mass? (And does Higgs give it/them a mass?)
If matter has anti-matter, does dark matter have anti-dark matter?
Science is probably in its infancy, even with all the wonders it has produced, so I would say that yeah the Standard Model will be replaced, and then whatever replaces it will be replaced....
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The fact that neutrinos are massive or massless plays no role in the way they interact. Neutrinos are only sensitive to the weak force, whose 'strength' is not related to mass. In fact, only the strength of gravity is connected to mass. For the other three interactions, we have different 'charges' (in the general sense). For instance, for electromagnetism this would be the electric charge (and not the mass)
Photon and gluons that respectively mediate the electromagnetic and the strong force are massless particles. While the Higgs boson interacts with photons and gluons, these interactions are a bit special so that they are not proportional to the masses of the involved particles.
Photons and gluons are hence really massless (this is also a prediction of the Standard Model).
Yes or no. This depends on how dark matter is included in the theory. It could be its own antiparticle, or not. In fact, it is not even clear that neutrinos and anti-neutrinos are not the same thing. Both options are allowed by data for now.
Isn't it how science has been built from the early days? :D
Interesting. Perhaps I need to study what physicists mean by 'mass', because right now I'm having a hard time understanding how something without a mass can exist in time and space. I often find that the best way (for me) to understand something difficult in science, is to read what philosophers have to say about it! E.g. just found a book that's only about mass and its history: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691144320/concepts-of-mass-in-contemporary-physics-and-philosophy
So maybe I'll read that in the future. But I worry that by the time I do, scientists will have changed their models!
I don't know how to explain this better. Sorry.
The way those massless particles behave is entirely dictated by special relativity, so that this is by far non trivial (and not high-school level). Those particles for instance travel at the speed of light. Moreover, they feel gravitational fields (that's general relativity), even with being massless, etc.
The story is far from trivial, as can be guessed. The point that can maybe make it clearer (who knows?) is to recall that we discuss at the level of the microscopic world and not the macroscopic one. Things are very different in there.