This single razor separates the productive posits — the neutrino, the quark, General Relativity — from the discarded ones — the aether, caloric, phlogiston, the planet Vulcan. Everything below is measured against it, including RealQM.
Weak point. It was introduced (Yukawa, 1935) specifically to bind nuclei, after the proton–electron picture was dropped. If Coulomb geometry (RealNucleus) can do the binding, Occam's razor removes the founding justification for a new force. And the two 1932 objections that opened the door — Heisenberg's confinement-energy bound and the spin–statistics (N-14) anomaly — are framework-internal: they presume spin-½ point particles and the uncertainty principle, and dissolve in a deterministic, geometric, nuclear-scale-mass model.
Correction. Removing the founding role is not removing the entity. The strong force is confirmed on independent grounds — quarks seen directly in deep-inelastic scattering, QCD's confirmed predictions (asymptotic freedom, the Ω−). RealNucleus is silent on all of it. Defensible claim: binding alone does not compel the force — not the force is unnecessary.
Insight. In RealNucleus a neutron is a bound proton+electron, so beta decay is the release of a pre-existing electron — the existence and direction of decay need no neutrino.
Limit. The phenomena that actually forced the neutrino — the continuous energy spectrum and momentum balance — are direct measurements, not framework artifacts. Both escape routes (energy hidden in "the whole nucleus"; the detected particles perhaps not from beta decay) were historically tested and closed: Ellis–Wooster calorimetry (1927) showed the missing energy leaves invisibly; Cowan–Reines (1956) tied detection to the source by reactor on/off. So "beta decay without neutrinos" runs into hard data; silence on the neutrino is the honest stance.
Weak point (insider-recognized). The speculative frontier — string theory, the multiverse, supersymmetry, anthropics — genuinely suffers unfalsifiability and "explains anything, predicts nothing" (Smolin, Woit, Hossenfelder: aesthetics and "naturalness" standing in for evidence).
Correction. This lands on the frontier, not the trunk. Established physics (Standard Model, GR, QED to twelve digits) is the most precisely tested in history. The GR–QM incompatibility is a recognized open problem, not a swallowed contradiction. The frontier drifted because the reachable problems were solved and what remains lies beyond experimental reach — the empirical referee left the field, and aesthetics plus sociology filled the vacuum.
Weak point. The MM null result is explainable without Einstein's spacetime (Lorentz, neo-Lorentzian, Many-Minds via signal-exchange protocols) — John Bell himself favoured the Lorentzian route.
Correction. SR's "paradoxes" are resolved puzzles, not logical contradictions, and the effects (time dilation, GPS) are measured — a reformulation reframes interpretation but not the measurements. If Many-Minds reproduces the Lorentz transformations it is empirically equivalent to SR: a legitimate rival formulation judged on parsimony, not a refutation.
Mature theories are subsumed, not falsified. GR extends Newton (reduces to it in the weak field); "Newton overthrown" is overstated rhetoric that mislabels bounding as refuting. The case rests on the in-domain 43″, not the out-of-domain light result.
The razor cuts evenly. “One world, two forces, no ghosts, one Poisson equation” is itself an aesthetic attractor — as seductive as "naturalness," and aesthetics is not confirmation. So:
RealQM's real virtue is that it can submit to this — it is deterministic, computable, falsifiable. Its obligation is to actually do so where it currently does not: the beta spectrum, scattering data, the general-relativistic observations.