America's leadership in basic science sows the seeds of our future prosperity, ennobles our society with a higher purpose, and provides a common ground for peaceful cooperation with other nations. We depend upon basic science as a resource, mined from an inexhaustible mother lode of knowledge. The federal government acts as the primary custodian of this resource, ensuring a balanced and refined supply, freely shared by all. The Standard Model High-energy physics has qualities and value that make it unique among the branches of basic science. Only high-energy physics seeks to articulate the fundamental character of physical law, and to identify the primary agents and constituents of physical reality.
Physical events play out upon an underlayment of interwoven fields of energy and matter.
High-energy physicists tug at the microscopic knots of this cosmic weave. They divine the symmetries that give it order and elegance, and untangle the dense woof of its complex dynamics. Ghostlike neutrinos stream through the earth and leave no effect, but quarks are trapped in tiny prisons by powerful nuclear glue. Some particles, left undisturbed, will live forever, but others wink in and out of existence in the most fleeting of moments. Gravity reaches across the universe to corral whole galaxies, while the weak force cannot even reach across a proton to grab a quark.