" Also neutrinos show large mixings in their mass coupling, so it's not accurate to talk about neutrino masses in the flavor basis or to suggest a left handed electron neutrino and a right handed electron neutrino have the same mass as this table seems to suggest. *** - What is actually measured experimentally are the masses of baryons and hadrons and various cross section rates . Since quarks can't be isolated because of QCD confinement, the quantity here is supposed to be the mass of the quark at the renormalization scale of the QCD phase transition. In order to compute this quantity, physicists have to set up a lattice model and try out various masses for the quarks until the model comes up with a close fit with experimental data. Since the masses of the first generation quarks are significantly below the QCD scale, the uncertainties here are pretty large. In fact, current QCD lattice models seem to suggest a significantly lower mass of these quarks from that of this table. The fermions can be arranged in three generations, the first one consisting of the electron, the up and down quarks, and the electron neutrino. Import Model All ordinary matter is made from first generation particles; the higher generation particles decay quickly into the first generation ones and can only be generated for a short time in high-energy experiments. The reason for arranging them in generations is that the four fermions in each generation behave almost exactly like their counterparts in the other generations; the only difference is in their masses. "

" Models are usually man-constituted. That justifies talking about their purpose prior to talking about their consistency. 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. For an investigator I it makes only sense to consider an entity M as a substitute of an entity O, if I can (1) establish an analogy, similarity, or similar relation between M and O that permits the substitution of O by M with respect to purpose and means, time-horizon etc. , and (2) I can actually investigate M in the required way. That implies firstly that M does not have the properties of O that prevent I from investigating O. Christian Model Also other properties of O may not be properties of M. In that sense a model is more abstract than its original. "