Why should the U.S. remain a world leader in the science of high-energy physics?

Essay by lx_962High School, 10th gradeA, November 2002

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We watch with wonder the images beamed back to Earth by the Mars Sojourner probe: wonder at the fact that we are seeing pictures of a new, largely unexplored world. It is a great tribute to our space program that we can see these pictures and wonder, that these images lead us to ask important questions about our place in the cosmos. Yet we are also exploring strange new worlds right here on Earth, worlds just as wondrous, worlds that require new and exciting technologies just to visit, worlds that ask and answer even more questions about how our universe came to be. These are the worlds of inner space, as far inside the structure of matter as we can see. Deep inside the atom there exists a world of tiny, invisible particles that are the building blocks of the universe; this is the world of high-energy physics.

If we could send back pictures from this world, it would look far stranger than Mars. We would see particles arise out of nothingness, fluttering into existence for a billionth of a billionth of a second, and then disappearing back into the void. We would see a world of amazing order and predictability, yet one whose fundamental patterns and symmetries are mysteriously broken. And we know that some day this world will give us answers to fundamental questions, such as: Why do things have mass? Why is there so much matter and so little antimatter? And why are there so many of these tiny "elementary" particles, anyway?

When people ask why we should continue to do research about a world so removed, so different from our own, I say the reasons are just the same as in the exploration of space, or any other new frontier. The journey is in...