Comment November Revolution (Score 1) 61
I doubt any revolution in particle physics would ever come from *WITHIN* particle physics.
Really? It has already happened once with something called the November Revolution. This was the discovery of the charm quark which completely revolutionized our understanding of what baryons and mesons were and ushered in the quark model.
Prior to that there was the prediction of anti-matter by Dirac followed by its discovery a few years later which showed that we could unite quantum mechanics and Special Relativity. Prior to that there was Rutherford's discovery of the atom which completely changed our understanding of the nature of matter and all the early work with particles which lead to quantum mechanics. In fact if you look back at the last century or so of physics many of the major paradigm shifts in the field have come from particle physics or its clear precursor.
If you think that getting a PhD merely requires you to accept certain beliefs then you have a very poor understanding about how science works. Good PhD students will challenge the beliefs of those examining them and defend their work using the data and analysis they have in their thesis.
As for damaging careers coming up with some radical new idea will greatly enhance anyone's career...provided that they put in the ground work to do the studies needed to convince others of its worth. Big experiments are an issue because the amount of ground work to get one of these funded is huge and this limits the scope of ideas to ones which are clearly going to work.
Lastly though as for thinking of the Standard Model as the truth absolutely nothing could be more wrong. In fact we usually start by pointing out one of its most obvious flaws: there is no gravity in it! Indeed we particle physicists spend all our time trying to break it by looking for physics beyond what it allows for. Whoever finds physics beyond the Standard Model is likely to end up with a Nobel Prize so I'm not sure why you would think we would not he extremely motivated to break it and why this would not be really good for anyone's career.