In seriousness, a lot of particle physics has to do with smashing shit together really really hard and then studying what comes out. If I am for instance trying to observe a k meson, the way I'd do that is to accelerate a bunch of gold nuclei up to 10 or 12 TeV (i dont remember how fast that is in m/s; some small fraction of the speed of light), smash those gold nuclei into eachother, then look at the spray of particles that comes out. The expected products of a collision like that are heavily dependent on what you started with before any smashing occurs, so particle physicists do tend to care pretty significantly about macro molecules like metal. Mostly because of their decay products, but the metal is important