Question: why do we need to know what particals are, if we do know that, how important are they?

Daniel Scully answered on 16 Nov 2011:

Particles make up everything in the Universe, that includes the world around you and even you yourself. So knowing about particles is knowing about what you’re made of.

And everything you do is controlled by how particles behave. If you sit on a chiar it’s the forces between particles which stop you falling through it.

It may seem like knowing about those particles isn’t of any benefit though… but, for example, every electronic device you own like a computer or phone are built using the particle physics that we were discovering 80 years ago. We wouldn’t know how to make them otherwise!

So although I can’t tell you what the particle physics of today will be of practical use for… who knows what we’ll be missing out on in the future if we don’t discover it now!

But the best reason for studying particle physics is not because of the need to do so but because of the want… trying to understand how the Universe works is interesting, it’s fascinating… and I think that’s justification enough for why we study it.