The Standard Model is what physicists call the current theory of fundamental particles and their interactions. It incorporates all that is known about subatomic particles and has predicted the existence of additional particles.

In the Standard Model there are quarks, leptons, gluons and bosons, each so inconceivably small yet permeating all of space and collecting into protons, neutrons, atoms and molecules to build structures of proteins and people.

A panoply of discussions, illustrations and presentations about real and virtual particles and the Standard Model fills thousands of pages of scholarly journals. Because of all its successes, including predicting and locating the elusive Higgs particle, the Standard Model remains a favored theory but not a perfect one.

In physics, as in all science, the favored theory is the one that best explains the facts. A theory that has been verified from several independent tests as the Standard Model has been will not be easily overturned by scant evidence.

But some important issues trouble the Standard Model.

Every theory is incomplete, but some are more complete than others. The Standard Model is a good theory that explains much of what we know about the matter and energy that comprise the universe. It is not a complete theory, however, because it fails to explain several other things we know about the universe.

One is dark matter. We know there is something out there that influences the motion of stars in galaxies that is not due merely to the gravitational mass of the visible galaxy. We cannot see the dark matter, but we can detect it by the effect it has on stars, especially those near the outer edges of the galaxies, which are moving too fast to be under only the influence of the galaxy’s gravity.

According to the Standard Model, the big bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Yet today for every bit of antimatter, there are 1 billion bits of matter. What happened to all the antimatter, and what led to it being destroyed?

The Standard Model also fails when gravity is added. The incompatibility of quantum theory and general relativity is a thorn in the side of theoretical physicists. The singularity that might lurk at the center of a black hole is not only incompatible with physics, but also with the mathematics that breaks down in the presence of singularities.

Many researchers now are interested in the potential of the Higgs field for digging deeper into the Standard Model’s intricacies. Europe and China are planning supercolliders five times the size of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, which first identified the Higgs in 2012.

As with all esoteric research, many question the expenditure of billions of dollars to answer these questions about things so obscure and distant from our daily existence.

Although they are far away, these things are closer than we think. There is a connection between the very large and the very small. The smaller the object, the smaller the wavelength needed to see it, but smaller wavelength equates to higher energy — and so to see these deep, distant structures require energy, which requires money.

Richard Brill is a retired professor of science at Honolulu Community College. His column runs on the first and third Fridays of the month. Email questions and comments to brill@hawaii.edu.