From Jesse Dunietz at Scientific American:
Scientists aren’t yet certain that electrons and their relatives are violating the Standard Model of particle physics, but the evidence is mounting
The evidence comes from electrons and their more massive cousins, muons and tau leptons. According to the Standard Model, these three particles should behave like differently sized but otherwise identical triplets. But three experiments have produced growing evidence—including results announced in just the last few months—that the particles react differently to some as-yet mysterious influence. The findings are not yet conclusive, but if they hold up, “it would be a complete revolution,” says California Institute of Technology theorist Mark Wise. More.
Many have been revolting against the Standard Model and the Big Bang forever, and always will be, because these guiding assumptions do not especially provide evidence for a random, naturalist model of the universe. Or not particularly. With respect to this model,
The evidence is even harder to swallow given how far lepton universality is from theorists’ expectations of where cracks in the Standard Model might show up. “There’s sort of a story line that the theorists tell,” Wise says, and “this isn’t in the story line.” What’s worse, the proposed explanations for the leptons’ behavior seem ad hoc and unsatisfying. “The kind of models that can fit the…anomalies don’t really do anything else at first sight,” Ligeti says. “For example, they don’t get you any closer to understanding what dark matter might be.”
Their speculations reap attention and keep hopes alive for decades, without establishing anything concrete.
But that doesn’t really matter as long as they keep the circus rolling.
See also: How naturalism rots science from the head down
and
The Big Bang: Put simply, the facts are wrong