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Despite the stereotype of a lonely, wild-haired Einstein working tirelessly on a blackboard, today’s greatest discoveries in physics come from large collaborations of scientists working on huge gadgets that can cost billions of dollars, often located in the most extreme places on Earth. After all, it is only the fabric universe that they are trying to understand.
In the past century, physicists have revealed a surprising amount about how our universe works, while simultaneously leaving big questions unanswered. Some of the most important advances have been understanding how small particles interact and affect the functioning of the cosmos. Everything we can detect in the universe is made of particles, the behavior of which is described by a theory called the Standard Model of particle physics. That theory divides the particles into quarks and leptons (which include electrons and ghostly neutrino particles). Each of those particles has an antiparticle that has the same mass but is essentially a mirror image, with the opposite electrical charge.
These particles interact through forces governed by other particles called bosons. You may have heard of the Higgs boson – it was the last predicted but undetected particle of the Standard Model, and the scientists finally announced their discovery in 2012. That was a huge victory for the field, the kind of headline science that justifies the massive pricing of particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider. But since then, despite a lot of interesting research, there’s It has not been another great discovery comparable to the Higgs.
There is so much that we don’t know yet. The Standard Model does not explain what caused the beginning of the universe, or why there is much more matter than antimatter, or the nature of a mysterious and invisible material called dark matter. It does not explain why the expansion of the universe is accelerating, an effect currently attributed to the so-called dark energy.
These questions and other mysteries about the universe have led physicists to build some truly mind-blowing instruments in search of answers. See some of the most amazing experiments in our slide show below. (Desktop users, navigate using “next” and “previous” at the bottom of the page).
