One of the recurring temptations in physics is to mistake violence for depth.
When we push matter to extreme energy densities—whether in particle colliders or in thought experiments about the early universe—we tend to believe we are peeling away layers of reality, discovering ever more “fundamental” constituents beneath the familiar surface of stable matter. The shorter-lived and more exotic a state is, the more “real” it sometimes appears to us.
In my most recent RG paper (Lecture X1), I tried to step back from that reflex.
The starting point is almost embarrassingly simple:
stable charged particles persist; unstable ones do not.
That fact alone already carries a surprising amount of explanatory power—if we resist the urge to overinterpret it.
Stability as the exception, not the rule
If we imagine the early universe as a high-energy, high-density environment—a kind of primordial soup—then instability is not mysterious at all. Under such conditions, long-lived, self-consistent structures should be rare. Most configurations would be fleeting, short-lived, unable to maintain their identity.
From this perspective, stable particles are not “primitive building blocks” in a metaphysical sense. They are low-energy survivors: configurations that remain coherent once the universe cools and energetic chaos subsides.
Stability, then, is not something that needs to be explained away. It is the phenomenon that needs to be accounted for.
Colliders as stress tests, not ontological excavations
Modern facilities such as CERN allow us to recreate, for fleeting moments, energy densities that no longer exist naturally in the present universe. What we observe there—resonances, decay chains, short-lived states—is fascinating and deeply informative.
But there is a subtle conceptual shift that often goes unnoticed.
These experiments do not necessarily reveal deeper layers of being. They may instead be doing something more modest and more honest: testing how known structures fail under extreme conditions.
In that sense, unstable high-energy states are not more fundamental than stable ones. They are what stability looks like when it is pushed beyond its limits.
A simpler cosmological intuition
Seen this way, cosmogenesis does not require an ever-growing menagerie of proto-entities. A universe that begins hot and dense will naturally favor instability. As it cools, only a small number of configurations will remain phase-coherent and persistent.
Those are the particles we still see today.
No exotic metaphysics is required—only the recognition that persistence is meaningful.
Were the mega-projects worth it?
This perspective does not diminish the value of large-scale scientific projects. On the contrary.
The enormous investments behind colliders or fusion experiments—think of projects like ITER—have given us something invaluable: empirical certainty. They confirmed, with extraordinary precision, intuitions already sensed by the giants of the early twentieth century—figures like Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac, and Erwin Schrödinger.
Perhaps the deepest outcome of these projects is not that they uncovered a hidden zoo of ultimate constituents, but that they showed how remarkably robust the basic structure of physics already was.
That, too, is progress.
Knowing when not to add layers
Physics advances not only by adding entities and mechanisms, but also by learning when not to do so. Sometimes clarity comes from subtraction rather than accumulation.
If nothing else, the simple distinction between stable and unstable charged particles reminds us of this: reality does not owe us an ever-deeper ontology just because we can afford to build more powerful machines.
And perhaps that realization—quiet, unglamorous, but honest—is one of the most valuable lessons high-energy physics has taught us.
This reflection builds directly on an earlier blog post, “Stability First: A Personal Programme for Re-reading Particle Physics” (18 December 2025), in which I outlined a deliberate shift in emphasis: away from ontological layering and towards persistence as a physical criterion. That post introduced the motivation behind Lecture X1—not as a challenge to established data or formalisms, but as an invitation to reread them through a simpler lens. What follows can be read as a continuation of that programme: an attempt to see whether the basic distinction between stable and unstable charged particles already carries more explanatory weight than we usually grant it.
Post Scriptum — An empirical follow-up
When I wrote this piece, the emphasis was deliberately conceptual. The central idea was to treat stability versus instability as a primary organizing perspective, rather than starting from particle families, quark content, or other internal classifications. At the time, I explicitly presented this as an intuition — something that felt structurally right, but that still needed to be confronted with data in a disciplined way.
That confrontation has now been carried out.
Using the Particle Data Group listings as a source, I constructed a deliberately minimalist dataset containing only two observables: rest mass and lifetime. All a priori particle classifications were excluded. Stable or asymptotic states were removed, as were fractionally charged entities, leaving an unclassified ensemble of unstable particles. The resulting mass–lifetime landscape was examined in logarithmic coordinates and subjected to density-based clustering, with the full data table included to allow independent reanalysis.
The outcome is modest, but instructive. A dominant continuum of prompt decays clearly emerges, accompanied by only weak additional structure at longer lifetimes. No rich taxonomy presents itself when decay behaviour alone is considered — but the clusters that do appear are real, reproducible, and consistent with the intuition developed here and in earlier work.
This empirical annex does not “prove” a new theory, nor does it challenge existing classifications. Its value lies elsewhere: it shows what survives when one strips the description down to observables alone, and it clarifies both the power and the limits of a stability-first perspective.
For readers interested in seeing how these ideas behave when confronted with actual data — and in re-using that data themselves — the empirical follow-up is available here:
👉 Empirical Annex to Lecture X1 (Revisiting Lecture XV)
Structure in the Energy–Lifetime Plane of Unstable PDG Particles
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/399008132_Empirical_Annex_to_Lecture_X1_Revisiting_Lecture_XV_Structure_in_the_Energy-Lifetime_Plane_of_Unstable_PDG_Particles
Sometimes, the most useful result is not a spectacular confirmation, but a careful consistency check that tells us where intuition holds — and where it stops.
Reading Feynman 
Jean: all those short lived collider particles are the subatomic equivalent of New Year’s eve firework explosions. Studying them doesn’t teach you anything about gunpowder. In similar vein the particle physicist can’t tell you what an electron actually is. What he will do instead, is give you lies to children whilst censoring the guys who can. Like Williamson and van der Mark. They spent 7 years trying to get a paper published. They settled for a low-impact journal, and had to see it being “studiously ignored”. Than more recently, before they died, journals like Nature refused to publish any further papers because they would mean that the Standard Model is wrong on a variety of ways. PS: I don’t think you’ll get anything useful from an AI. It will give you a potted, dogmatic, version of mainstream physics, that’s all.
John — I think we actually agree on more than you suggest, but we’re talking past each other.
My recent work does not claim that short-lived collider products tell us what an electron “really is”. On the contrary: the whole point of the empirical annex I just published is to show how little structure survives when one looks only at decay traces (mass and lifetime) and deliberately strips away particle families, quark models, and theoretical narratives. What emerges is largely a continuum of prompt decay debris — very much like your firework analogy. That is not a refutation of mainstream physics, but a consistency check on how much can honestly be inferred from collision phenomenology alone.
So I am not “reading too much” into these traces. I am doing the opposite: showing, with data, where interpretation runs out.
As for censorship stories and alternative models: I’m not interested in adjudicating who journals treated unfairly, nor in replacing one grand explanatory framework with another. My focus is narrower and more empirical: what do the measurements themselves support, before ontology is layered on top? That question stands regardless of which theory one prefers.
Finally — and this is important — I’m not going to debate my use of AI. I use it as a technical tool to handle data, check consistency, and reduce friction in exploratory work. It does not supply my conclusions, and it does not think for me. Anyone who wants to dismiss the work on the basis that AI was involved is free to do so — but I won’t engage further on that point.
If you’re interested in the actual analysis, the data and methods are public and reproducible. If not, that’s fine too. But I’m not pursuing a polemic here — just careful, limited claims about what collision data can and cannot tell us.