Three US scientists were named winners of the 2004 Nobel physics prize for showing how tiny quark particles interact and so helping to explain everything from how a coin spins to how the universe was built.
Mr David Gross, Mr David Politzer and Mr Frank Wilczek had shown how the attraction between quarks - the basic building blocks of nature - was strong when they were far apart and weak when they were close together.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said their work on the "strong force" between quarks helped give "a unified description of all the forces of nature . . . from the tiniest distances within the atomic nucleus to the vast distances of the universe."
It explains how "an everyday phenomenon like a coin spinning on a table" is determined by fundamental forces between protons, neutrons, electrons. Protons and neutrons are made up of quarks, bound by the "strong force."
The strong force functions a bit like an elastic band that is tauter when it is pulled.
The three scientists, in a theory known as quantum chromodynamics, also showed that when quarks are close together at extremely high energies they act like free particles, a state they called "asymptotic freedom."
Mr Gross told Reuters the US trio had made a first step toward "the theory of everything."
A grand unified theory of life and the universe has eluded scientists who cannot yet reconcile the way subatomic particles behave with gravity.
The three Americans' research on quarks brought scientists closer to explaining the behavior of subatomic forces, which also include electromagnetism and a "weak force" dealing with radioactive decay.