Understanding the principles at the lowest level of the hierarchy—the smallest length-scales—is not the same as understanding nature. So much lies outside the accelerators’ domain, even if it is in some sense reducible to elementary particles. Chaotic turbulence; the large-scale structures that emerge in complex systems; life itself: Feynman spoke of “the infinite variety and novelty of phenomena that can be generated from such simple principles”—phenomena that are “in the equations; we just haven’t found the way to get them out.”
