"Physics" translates literally from Greek as "knowledge of nature". Today, an understanding of the natural world is essential not just to maintain our current standards of living, but to quench the intrinsic curiosity that humans have possessed ever since we reflected on the most basic of observations. Why does the sun shine? Why do objects float? How does lightning behave?

By constructing quantitative models of these phenomena, not only are we able to explain many of the observations we make in nature, but we are also able to probe our models to make predictions as to how the universe may behave. The interplay of experimentalists and theorists, exchanging observations with potential explanations, predictions with hard data, has led physics to be an incredibly broad field and highly interdisciplinary. On the experimental side, there is much interest in corroborating various predictions, and learning more about poorly-understood events from the subatomic to the intergalactic scales. Theorists too have their work cut out, with many of the existing models performing well within their domain, but contradicting each other.