Two of the major questions left unanswered by the Standard Model of particle physics have to do with hierarchies of mass scales. The first is the flavor problem: what determines the masses of the quarks and leptons, and why do they span such a large range, e.g. why is the top quark 3 × 10 times heavier than the electron? The second is the gauge hierarchy problem: why is the weak scale seventeen orders of magnitude smaller than the Planck scale?
The stakes are higher than the past. We aren’t asking about this or that particle, but something much more deeply structural about physical reality. … By far the best way to settle this question is to lead a charge to the highest possible energies and build a 100-TeV collider.
The hierarchy problem is the elephant in the room. ... And it originally showed up in the context of doublet–triplet splitting problem.
This is the best few tens of billions years in the history of the universe to do cosmology.
Whether in physics and mathematics or in the humanities, when something really finally works, it has a certain perfection to it, a feeling of inevitability, like it was so completely obvious all along, and it couldn't be any other way.