Over the course of the past century our understanding of the structure of matter has made huge progressions. Some of the most important things that have been discovered in this period are the decoding of the atom's structure, which provided a physical explanation of the periodic table of elements, another was finding out about quarks and leptons as the building blocks of matter.

Now DESY is being used to answer some of the more fundamental and unresolved questions with collaborations from different fields, which include physicists, engineers, and other types of experts. The questions trying to be answered that lead to the future of particle physics are: -

• How does the property MASS arise?
• What is the system underlying the extremely wide range of particle masses? o Why are there exactly three types of quark and three types of lepton?
• Why is the electrical charge of the electron (an elementary particle) identical with that of the proton, which is made up of quarks?

On a larger scale other questions are: -

• To view and find out about physical, chemical and biological processes on an atomic scale with respect to time.
• To decode the geometrical structures of proteins.

These are questions that in the past have arisen and produced new physics and experiments. This can be shown from when Rutherford had shown decades before that atoms have massive nuclei relative to the electrons circling them. They thought at this time the understanding of the fundamental structure of matter seemed complete. Quantum theory had made sense of atomic spectra and electron orbitals. The discovery of the neutron explained nuclear isotopes. So protons, neutrons, and electrons provided the building blocks of all matter. However there were still questions to be answered: -

• What holds the protons and neutrons together to form the nucleus?
• What are the forces involved in the radioactive decays of the nuclei that make alpha, beta, and gamma rays?

This then lead to the creation of particle accelerators. The way in which the unanswered questions of today will be answered are with bigger and improved particle accelerators, which could then lead to other theories and new physics. Reaching higher energies in these accelerators are like going back in time towards the big bang. At the big bang energy was so concentrated that high-energy particle physics was the way everything interacted who knows perhaps what will be discovered next maybe that is why physics is so appealing.