Gulliver boldly continues his journey. When protons and neutrons are magnified 1000 times, the Standard Model tells him what details as small as 1/1000 of their diameter will look like. What comes after that, at even greater magnifications, is uncertain. We are now entering the world of very heavy particles, carriers of forces over ultra-short distances. We will concentrate on structures at distance scales between 1/1000 and 1/10000000000000000000 (that is, 10−19) times the proton diameter.

This seemingly absurd figure implies that the territory we are entering now covers some sixteen orders of magnitude (sixteen more zeros). This is about as much as the difference in size between a house and an atomic nucleus.

Surely this new world could be just as complicated as the previous one, the one described in the preceding nineteen chapters. But it could also be quite a bit simpler, in the sense that it might be possible to extrapolate all of the laws of physics over the whole area. It certainly seems as if the rules which I described in Chapter 11 will remain irreplaceable. Perhaps we will continue to find other particles and other fields, but no matter how I adjust the magnification of my imaginary microscope, I will see the same ground rules for objects with spin 1, spin ½ and spin 0 (as long as the gravitational force may be neglected, but more about that later).