StarTalk | What the Standard Model Still Can’t Explain

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StarTalk | What the Standard Model Still Can’t Explain

In this conversation, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice speak with physicist Brian Cox about how modern physics explains the nature of reality through quantum field theory and the Standard Model.

Brian Cox explains that what we perceive as solid matter is actually made of excitations in underlying quantum fields, and that the Standard Model, while extraordinarily successful, is incomplete and filled with unexplained parameters that must be measured rather than derived.

The discussion focuses on why fundamental particles appear in three generations, how experiments at CERN confirmed this structure, and why we still don’t understand key aspects of nature such as the origin of particle masses, the deeper role of the Higgs field, or how gravity fits into quantum theory.

The conversation concludes by touching on black holes, quantum gravity, and the open challenge of unifying general relativity with quantum mechanics.

StarTalk

Neil deGrasse Tyson

StarTalk | What the Standard Model Still Can’t Explain

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