... like most physicists, I really enjoy talking about physics. - Nima Arkani-Hamed

... nature has very few good ideas — it recycles them in subtle and interesting ways, over and over again — and it's our job to understand how that works.

Two of the major questions left unanswered by the Standard Model of particle physics have to do with hierarchies of mass scales. The first is the flavor problem: what determines the masses of the quarks and leptons, and why do they span such a large range, e.g. why is the top quark 3 × 10⁵ times heavier than the electron? The second is the gauge hierarchy problem: why is the weak scale seventeen orders of magnitude smaller than the Planck scale?

This is the best few tens of billions years in the history of the universe to do cosmology.