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domain of nature, the beginning of a new set of puzzles, and the beginning of our quest to discover something completely and radically new. The story always seems to turn out to be much bigger and grander than we may think it is at any given time.
    Indeed, a curious parallel to the Norse myth continues: After its fabrication, Wotan (Odin) donned the Nibelungen's ring and went forth in his earthly wanderings, eventually ceding the ring to Siegfried, who slew dragons and rescued the beautiful Brunhilde from her eternal sleep on the fiery top of a volcano. Ultimately, in Götterdämmerung at the end of the Ring Cycle, the gods perish through their own perfidy and tomfoolery with the golden ring, ceding the future world down to the humans.
    The message is clear: we must progress beyond a belief in demi-gods, dwarves, trolls, and selfish and angry gods—beyond the fairy tales we are taught as little children. The world ultimately belongs to and is stewarded, for better or worse, by humans. Perhaps the present moniker “Beyond the God Particle” fits all of this. Humans are continually making progress in learning how the universe really works, beyond fairy tales and myths, and through such profoundly successful international collaborations as at Fermilab and CERN, learning how to work and live together across national boundaries and cultural frontiers. It's all about collaboration on the largest scales of human endeavor. It's ultimately all about the future of people.
    And so, we'll now abandon the term “God Particle” and look in greater detail at the Higgs boson, at the science of the smallest things in nature and what we are actually trying to do, and in many ways are succeeding in doing now—what we will achieve with the LHC, and what we hope to do, and must do, in the future. We are also looking beyond the Higgs boson, both as a thing and as an idea. With the Higgs boson in hand, physicists now have a powerful new insight into how nature generates its fundamental patterns and its properties of the elementary particles, and a new, powerful way to understand the remaining mysterious puzzles of the physical world.

The most fundamental of questions we are asking today concern the smallest objects, objects that lie far beyond the atom, the quarks, the leptons (“matter”) and gauge bosons (“force carriers”), the Higgs boson, and whatever lies beyond these things. Here we are exploring a strange new world—a world of the smallest things. No one has ever been here before, to examine what is happening at the smallest distances that are now probed by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This is not entirely blind exploration, for we actually have an inkling of what we are trying to understand—but surprises may be around the next corner.
    In short: we are attempting to answer the vexing question: What is the origin of mass? Mass is one of the most important defining quantities of matter. But where does it come from? What makes mass happen? Will we ever become skillful enough to calculate the mass of the electron or the muon or the top quark from a “first principle”? What shapes and controls and sculpts the elementary constituents of matter and their masses?
    This is a bit like trying to answer the deep biological question “What and where is the genetic code of life?” The answer to that question came in the 1950s—it turned out to be encoded into a very long and durable molecule called DNA. And from that has come an entirely new set of capabilities, as DNA can be “read” and “reread” and, eventually, we think, “rewritten.” All structure and function and ultimately all diseases of living organisms are controlled by DNA and its associated processes. Understanding DNA and its evolution is the foundation of understanding all life on Earth. Our open physics questions today are much like the biological ones before the 1950s: “What causes the phenomenon of mass?” Put another way, “What is the DNA of matter