MIT Physics News Spotlight After a Golden Age Frank Wilczek,
NOVA June 6, 2012 Three icons of twentieth century science.
Clockwise: The double helix structure of DNA, revealed by
analysis of its x-ray diffraction pattern (credit: Richard
Wheeler via Wikimedia); anisotropies in the microwave background
radiation, providing a picture of the very early universe
(credit: WMAP Science Team, NASA); motion of the continents,
proved and then mapped by analysis of magnetic field reversals
at mid-ocean ridges. In each case, the enabling sensitive
instruments and technologies depend upon profound understanding
of the properties of matter, based on microphysics (credit:
EMAG2) Are physicists victims of their own success? They have
strived to find the fundamental laws of matter, and in recent
years they’ve done it. The so-called standard model of physics
provides us with a thorough census of the subatomic particles
that combine to make everything we see, and its equations define
a complete mathematical explanation of how