Subatomic-particle research has made enormous progress in the 20th Century by looking inside matter at deeper and deeper levels. It is as if we were peeling the layers of an onion in the hopes of finding more basic rules for the structure of nature. Great experiments of the 20th century have led to the discovery of ever-smaller entities that make up what were once thought to be indivisible particles. Moreover, the theory of the very small has been shown to be intimately connected to the largest scales imaginable – cosmology and the beginnings of the universe. Despite these considerable successes, the current theory has within it the seeds of its own demise and is predicted to break down when probed at even smaller scales. One of such examples is the origin of mass of fundamental particles. We have achieved a beautiful and profound understanding of how fundamental particles acquire their mass, but the mass values remain deeply mysterious. In addition, we learned that ordinary matter supplies only a small fraction of mass in the Universe. We continue to peel away at the more hidden layers of truth with the hope of discovering a more elegant and complete theory.
