[phkahler]

>> I sometimes make the analogy "in particle physics, you don't actually see the collision. You see the after effects and then figure out what happened by going backwards to what must have occurred."

I keep coming back to that. Nobody has ever directly seen direct the force carrying particles, only their effects (indirect evidence). The models make excellent predictions, but I still feel like they're "wrong" in some sense.

[bdamm]

This is the only fact we know for certain in physics; we know for sure that our existing models are incorrect. But they sure are great at lots of stuff and correctly predict lots of phenomenon so until someone can come up with a better model they're likely to continue to be used widely!