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Originally Posted by stremba70
Except that all experimental evidence points to quarks being elementary, and there is no evidence whatsoever for a fractal like infinitely small structure for matter. Quarks are smaller than their Compton wavelength based on scattering experiments. This means that there is no possibility of detecting any smaller substructure within them. Ditto for electrons, muons, tau particles and their associated neutrinos. These are elementary particles.
The Standard Model indeed may be incomplete. However, we cannot just imagine things that seem right to us; we must be constrained by experimental evidence. Non-elementary quarks, leptons, photons, gluons, W, and Z bosons are ruled out by experiment.
Likewise, there is no spin/orbital angular momentum coupling in classical systems, so there is no reason we should expect there to be any simple relationship between the length of the year and the length of the day. Nor is there any evidence for any cataclysm that could have increased the length of a year by 5.25 days. The references in the ancient texts undoubtedly had more to do with bad astronomy than any scientific fact. If anything, since the earths rotation has slowed, there would have been more days in a year in the past, not less, although the effect admittedly would have been too small to notice over a period of only a few thousand years.
"bad astronomy" is not at all likely given their recorded accuracy, see pyramids etc. There is evidence of multiple cataclysms altering the relation between earth and the sky, orbital periods and so on. The assumption of 'uniformity' is infectious and a barrier to understanding our history. The facts, recorded historical facts not some assumption that newtons law of gravity must hold now always and forever, are that great changes have occurred in the night sky over the course of relatively recent history. Velikovsky has shown that Venus began as a comet around 1500 BC, spewing from Jupiter and wrestling with its own tail for control of the sky. During this period the heavenly bodies, moon and sun, remained motionless in the sky for a period, which he naturally identifies as a stoppage of earth rotation, and gigantic variations in frictional forces, causing all kinds of earthquakes and disaster as well as electrical exchanges between the planetary bodies, which are charged. This is all recorded, if you allow the right guide to illuminate the way and understand truly what is meant by the historical record. All this of course played havoc with the calendar. To suggest that none of this is possible because Earth and the planets were formed 4.5 billion years ago by some miracle of gravity and basically haven't changed since except a slight slowing due to energy losses is simply incompatible with the historic record, and implausible. But of course, mention this to anybody in the field and they run a mile, which is fine, but they are missing something very big here.
Experiment is the only way to validate hypotheses, true. I assume this is not the end of particle accelerators, there is far too much of an industry around it. Presumably they will want to try and smash up 'fundamental' particles at some point. Are they actually testing hypotheses though? Or justifying immense budgets and continued funding without actually furthering any useful theory. They say that when the proton and electron were first verified there was some discomfort that there are two fundamental particles, the ideal discovery would be one, two is overly complicated, why two? Imagine their horror these days. All these particles, and all these different weird forces that don't quite gel - if experiment is our constraint how about proving gravity by experiment; Cavendish is invalid since the effect cannot be isolated from electrical interaction, as is probably the case for any set up. The most obvious conclusion being that gravity is a weak mode of the electric force. To explain this requires some supposition about fundamental particles possessing structure - an arrangement of charge in all matter being disturbed and redistributed by the presence of other bits of matter, which is perfectly reasonable and would give rise on a great scale to a weak force that is much smaller than electromagnetism but deriving from essentially the same interaction. If only as a metaphysical fancy, since as you say structure of fundamental particles is not currently testable, it is of course much more plausible for matter to exist beyond some point which is purely a mathematical model due to the inadequacy of measurement in resolving beyond. The word 'elementary' presumably derives from the same origin as 'element' which first were considered earth, fire etc then as unique chemical substances, then as particular arrangements of more fundamental bits.
