I feel a little foolish asking this, but I keep reading sources which say that for an inverse square law relationship, e.g. light intensity vs distance from source, the intensity decays exponentially. Are inverse square and exponential the same? I would think not, as I cannot find an algebraic w...

Please do not get me wrong. There is a question that disturbs me time and again. The Standard Model of particle physics is immensely successful. However, it has many experimentally fitted input parameters (e.g. the fermion masses, mixing angles, etc). How seriously can we take the success of the ...