The universe was once much smaller than the size of an atom. Small things mattered in this small universe, where quantum physics dominated the scene. To understand how the universe works today, we have to solve remaining major quantum puzzles.
Theoretical particle physicist Hitoshi Murayama discusses these puzzles -- the recently-discovered Higgs boson and mysterious dark matter -- in his Bethe Lecture Oct. 21, 2015. Murayama is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and the founding director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo.