  We describe one of the remarkable problems of theoretical physics persevering
up to the beginning of the millennium. All gaugetheories with spontaneous gauge
symmetry breaking from the standard model of particle physics with the
electroweak symmetry breaking at the Fermi scale, 246 GeV, up to strings,
supergravity, and the M(embrane)-theory superunification with symmetry breaking
starting near the Planck scale, $10^{19}$ GeV, foresee that the spontaneous
symmetry breakings induce a vacuum energy at least 50 orders of magnitude
larger than the stringent experimental bound $G\Lambda\lesssim 10^{-122}$ on
the value of the cosmological constant $\Lambda$. This fact seems to have a
universal character since it occurs from the Fermi scale up to the Planck one.
It is the vacuum catastrophe.

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology