The lofty endeavour of particle physicists — to understand the birth, evolution and ultimate fate of the Universe by studying its fundament tal particles — has just received a significant boost. The fiendishly difficult equations of the strong nuclear force have yielded to a 30-year effort to allow the first precise prediction of a composite particles mass, a prediction promptly confirmed by experiment. The computational technique responsible, lattice quantum chromodynamics, could also be used to estimate quark masses better, to shed light on the origin of mass, and to reveal how the Universe, originally made of matter and antimatter in equal proportions, ended up containing j ust matter.
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