Holy grail of particle physics

Physicists like to describe nature in the simplest and most elegant theoretical framework. A significant development towards such a description of the sub-atomic world during the 1970s was the unification of disparate forces of nature (excluding gravity) in a single theoretical framework. But this unification came at a price. The elegant mathematical symmetry that made it possible required all elementary particles to be massless, which is not the real world we know. So the underlying universal symmetry had to be ‘broken' to some degree for particles to have a range of masses and forces to have different strengths, and yet described by a single theory.

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