Originally Posted by toretorden

I understand the basics. If you know there are atoms, but you don't know what they're made up of, you can bang two atoms together really hard so they break into smaller pieces. With very fine measuring equipment, you can try and register those smaller bits.

That's what particle colliders do. They just bang particles together and hopefully, one can register the existence of even smaller particles than the ones you banged together. Perhaps it's somehow possible to get to the "bottom" of things (Higgs boson?), perhaps not. Discoveries of smaller particles and how they all relate to eachother advance physics.

edit :

In order to explain physics, some phycisists have hypothesized the existence of certain particles without actually knowing if they exist or not. That's part of what makes these experiments seem so deterministic, although they can't predict what's going to happen or what they will find, they're also looking for particles that so far only exist in theory.