Physicists have a lot to crow about. Last year they finally found the Higgs boson, which some call "the God particle". The discovery completes the Standard Model, a 40-year-old blueprint for how nature behaves at the smallest end of the scale. In April the European Space Agency's Planck satellite presented the most detailed picture yet of the cosmic microwave background (cmb), a relic of the radiation produced 400,000 years after the big bang, which holds clues to the universe's birth pangs 13.8 billion years ago. For all its successes, though, modern physics leaves some crucial questions unanswered. Chief among these is how to reconcile the two great discoveries of the 20th century-the Standard Model and Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, which deals with gravity-into "a theory of everything". Many scientists are asking themselves, what next?
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