Cosmological constant and spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking: the particle physics and cosmology interface charade

We describe one of the remarkable problems of theoretical physics persevering up to the beginning of the millennium. All gaugetheories with spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking from the standard model of particle physics with the electroweak symmetry breaking at the Fermi scale, 246 GeV, up to strings, supergravity, and the M(embrane)-theory superunification with symmetry breaking starting near the Planck scale, $10^{19}$ GeV, foresee that the spontaneous symmetry breakings induce a vacuum energy at least 50 orders of magnitude larger than the stringent experimental bound $G\Lambda\lesssim 10^{-122}$ on the value of the cosmological constant $\Lambda$. This fact seems to have a universal character since it occurs from the Fermi scale up to the Planck one. It is the vacuum catastrophe.