The Standard Model ...

The Standard Model defining how reality works from the physics perspective is incomplete but within its construct, it's the most successful depiction of how existence works at this point in time.

The Standard Model describes physics in the three spatial dimensions and one time dimension of our universe. It captures the interplay between a dozen quantum fields representing fundamental particles and a handful of additional fields representing forces. The Standard Model ties them all together into a single equation that scientists have confirmed countless times, often with astonishing accuracy. In the video, Professor Tong walks us through that equation term by term, introducing us to all the pieces of the theory and how they fit together. 

But it's still incomplete ...

The Standard Model has been a boon for physics, but it’s also had a bit of a hangover effect. It’s been extraordinarily effective at explaining experiments we can do here on Earth, but it can’t account for several major features of the wider universe, including the action of gravity at short distances and the presence of dark matter and dark energy. Physicists would like to move beyond the Standard Model to an even more encompassing physical theory. But, as the physicist Davide Gaiotto put it in the first piece in our series, the glow of the Standard Model is so strong that it’s hard to see beyond it.

Particles of the Standard Model of particle physics (Image: Daniel Dominguez/CERN)

In essence ...

The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory describing three of the four known fundamental forces (the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions, and not including gravity) in the universe, as well as classifying all known elementary particles.

The truth is out there ...