Everything you've ever held is buzzing with activity—electrons, atoms, and photons are all vibrating, interacting with each other, and generally just making a mess of things, and creating what you can see, smell, taste, touch, and hear. People have always wanted to understand what they interact with, and there's a great tendency towards what philosophers call reductionism, where scientists ask what something is made of, what the things that create that thing are made of, so on and so forth ad nauseum until eventually people arrive at the thing, the most fundamental object in the universe. You can see this sort of reductionism everywhere in physics if you know where to look—it's particularly present in the kinds of physics you see on TV, namely high energy physics (string theory in particular).