Physics canon is immutable

Carl Brannen writes:

I’m not trying to educate people in the standard model, but instead my slant on it.

This is an important difference from physicists’ attitude. As far as I understand you are not pushing your version as religious dogma. For physicists the physics version is not open to questioning by outsiders.¹ As a professional class with a protected monopoly on theoretical knowledge physicists always market and enforce their definitions as absolute truths.

Physics canon is immutable. It can only be amended, it cannot not be changed. What I mean is explained by Feynman in the link you provided to his book QED: The Strange Theory of Matter and Light. As quoted by commenter Michael Wischmeyer, Feynman

mentions that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is really no longer a necessary construct. “If you can get rid of all the old-fashioned ideas and instead use the ideas that I am explaining in these lectures–adding arrows for all the ways an event can happen–there is no need for an uncertainty principle.”

If uncertainty principle is superfluous it must be removed. But it cannot because it is part of the canon. Physicists continue to teach it as part of the canon and use it as a principle to prove other things and if they don’t need it they eliminate it either by mathematical fraud or by polemics.

Can we extend Feynman’s proposal of “getting rid of all the old-fashioned ideas” and start with a clean slate? To me events observed in accelerators² are many layers removed from what happens. And there is an incestuous relation between model and experiment. It seems to me that the software running the experiment decides what is observed. Any comments?

The problem with physics grad school is that the math is so difficult that students have very little time to contemplate and study the foundations of the theory.

I believe that students are not supposed to contemplate or question or doubt the physics that they are studying. They are supposed to cram the canon to pass the exams. Students who stop to question will be left behind and if they exhibit scientific skepticism and ask tough questions about physics they will be dubbed cranks by their peers and their careers will end. There is no room for non-conformist students in this system.

1. with the exception of your advice about how to do that. [↩]
2. I assume accelerators are where the data that Standard Model is trying to model comes from [↩]