What is the universe made of? The Standard Model is the theory of mostly everything.
Sign Up2. A mere three letters tell us that matter and energy are, essentially, the same. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which sets limits on what we can know about reality at small scales, fits neatly on a coffee mug.
“There’s a degree of ugliness to the Standard Model,” says Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, one of its architects. “But I think an elegant theory is one which leaves you with a sense that something has been explained, and we’ve made real progress in explaining nature using the Standard Model.”You may have heard that matter is, at its smallest scales, made of tiny dots — electrons and such — called particles. According to the Standard Model, you weren’t told the whole truth.
In the 1940s, physicists put the finishing touches on a theory that cast the electromagnetic force as quantum fields: quantum electrodynamics . It suggested that every electron is a ripple in the same electron field, and every particle of light is a ripple in a photon field. The Standard Model also added a slew of fields responsible for the particles that actually make up matter, including the quarks that comprise the nuclei of atoms, and neutrinos, which barely interact with other matter.