The big idea: are we about to discover a new force of nature?

Modern physics deals with some truly mind-boggling extremes of scale.

Cosmology reveals the Earth as a tiny dot amid an observable universe that is a staggering 93bn light years across.

Meanwhile, today’s particle colliders are exploring a microcosmic world billions of times smaller than the smallest atom.

These two extremes, the biggest and smallest distances probed by science, are separated by 47 orders of magnitude.

That’s one with 47 zeros after it, a…