Perspectives on Issues Beyond the Standard Model

Abstract

In this opening talk I first describe how we are entering a data-rich era, and what clues we might soon have to physics beyond the SM (on a time scale of several years). Then we turn to a number of the basic issues we hope to explain, and discuss what level of theory may address them, the SM or supersymmetric SM, or string theory, or "other". Next we consider some of the large number of fine-tunings we seem to have, and how they may be clues, focusing on how the fine-tuning of M$_{Z}$ and m$_{h}$ suggest the MSSM needs to be extended as the low scale theory, and on how flavor physics may be a powerful probe of string theory. Finally we examine using benchmark models to study all these issues.