🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov5.010054.24588@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>, crb7q@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Cameron Randale Bass) writes...
> 
>     Internal consistency does not constitute a 'test'.  It is a
>     necessary condition.

Only in a strictly logical sense.  But experience has taught us that 
consistency is, in practice, a very powerful guide in high-energy 
physics.  Chris Lewellyn-Smith (I apologize for the spelling - I never
can get the name right), the new director of CERN, is famous for,
among other things, demonstrating that you can "derive" the Standard
Model from nothing more than trying to build the simplest consistent
theory that includes all the particles we know about - all the wonderful
details of how they interact fall out of the model-building process
as you try to avoid unphysical results (non-unitarity) and inconsistency.

It is widely believed (or perhaps hoped) that the ultimate theory of 
everything will be unique in the sense that it is the only constructible
theory which is mathematically consistent at arbitrary energy.  In a
certain sense, the entire theoretical program of HEP is an attempt to 
construct at least one entirely consistent theory (something that has
*never* been done) of fundamental particles, which we then hope will
be the *only* possible one.

-Scott
--------------------
Scott I. Chase			"It is not a simple life to be a single cell,
SICHASE@CSA2.LBL.GOV		 although I have no right to say so, having
				 been a single cell so long ago myself that I 
				 have no memory at all of that stage of my 
				 life." - Lewis Thomas