To the outside observer, modern particle physics looks like a cross between religion and Emperor Has No Clothes. Much of what constitutes a successful researcher and institution is not practical result (or even tangible or reproducible), but instead is political.
I'm pretty sure that you walked out with no clothes in the scientific community, people would be happy to point out you have no clothes. People can make names for themselves poking holes in other's theories. Hell, Einstein tried to do that with quantum mechanics without much success.
I guess, in that sense it's political. But the politics here is to try to bring about rational reasoning. And eventually, quantum mechanics won, not because it was the most reasonable theory, (it's not and who would design a universe this way?), but it has the most amount of experimental evidence to back it up.
I don't think most physicists in this area think the Standard Model is "correct" in the sense of actually describing what makes the universe tick. They mostly recognize it as a set of curves that are extremely well fitted to experimental data, up to a point (at which point it fails completely and necessitates a switch to another model).
I'm not too current. Last time I looked at this was 2016. My take is: Many experiments are conducted on "unique" equipment which is inaccessible to outsiders. This makes experiments irreproducible in the classical sense. For example, the CERN particle accelerator is the largest in the world, no other similar facilities exist. Much of the research done is on such facilities.
2. Scientists in the field agree upon a "standard model", which predicts certain phenomena but not others. For the other phenomena, they use a different model, which is incompatible or not reconciled with the first model. Both of these models resemble over-fitted models that describe but don't explain. There is no beautiful, elegant combination of geometry and mathematics to discover the underlying meaning of the universe there.
3. Experiment results are highly processed by researchers and constitute terabytes or petabytes of data which is easy to manipulate to suit a researcher's opinion or political ends. Lots of noise and very little discernible signal.
4. Recent experiments don't seem to be yielding new, novel, interesting or viable lines of thinking.
> There is no beautiful, elegant combination of geometry and mathematics to discover the underlying meaning of the universe there.
This is not a fair criticism. Its not like some of the smartest groups of people alive have not tried for over half a century. Nobody has the slightest real clue on a way out. What else to do, except to constantly try and break the model somehow?
There's a cult around string theory, where despite it not producing a single testable hypothesis in its multi-decade dominance, it maintains its dominance as an orthodoxy, sucking up most of the research grants. Speaking out against string theory in the particle physics circles of academia gets you branded a heretic and outcast, potentially costing you a career in particle physics.
We cannot, and should not come to terms with the prospect that the universe's complexities may be totally out of our reach. Best to keep trying in one way or another. Unfortunately, my comments are not constructive, I don't have a better avenue to suggest. All that I can tell is that phenomenon on human scale are easier to grasp. The bigger or smaller you get, the harder it is to observe.
