" Lett. 83, 1529 (1999) . S. F. Novaes, Standard Model: An Introduction, hep-ph:0001283 I. Models are usually man-constituted. That justifies talking about their purpose prior to talking about their consistency. Model Railroad Club Of Texas Models are used as substitutes for originals because properties of the latter are of interest and the originals are not going to be investigated themselves. There may be a number of reasons for that such as taboos preventing from studying the original itself, or inability, the involved cost in terms of resources or moral damage being intolerable, or similar. "

" The electron and the electron-neutrino, and their counterparts in the other generations, are called "leptons", "weakly interacting particles". Unlike the quarks, they do not possess a quality called "color", and their interactions are only weak and electromagnetic, and fall off with distance. On the other hand, the strong or "color" force between quarks gets stronger with distance, so that quarks are always found in colorless combinations called hadrons, a phenomenon known as quark confinement. These are either fermionic baryons composed of three quarks (the proton and neutron being the most familiar example) or bosonic mesons composed of a quark-antiquark pair (such as pions). The mass of such aggregates exceeds that of the components due to their binding energy. Tests and predictions The Standard Model predicted the existence of W and Z bosons, the gluon, the top quark and the charm quark before these particles had been observed. Their predicted properties were experimentally confirmed with good precision. Ho Scale Model Railroad Layout The Large Electron-Positron collider at CERN tested various predictions about the decay of Z bosons, and found them confirmed. To get an idea of the success of the Standard Model a comparison between the measured and the predicted values of some quantities are shown in the following table: Quality Measured (GeV) SM prediction (GeV) Mass of W boson 80,4120±0,0420 80,3900±0,0180 Mass of Z boson 91,1874±0,0021 91,1874±0,0021 Challenges to the Standard Model Although the Standard Model has had great success in explaining experimental results, it has never been accepted as a complete theory of fundamental physics. "