We intend to show how fundamental science is drawn from the patterns in the temperature and polarization fields of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and thus to motivate the field of CMB research. We discuss the field's history, potential science and current status, contaminating foregrounds, detection and analysis techniques, and future prospects. Throughout the review we draw comparisons to particle physics, a field that has many of the same goals and that has gone through many of the same stages.