Eli5 what are quarks?
In: 7
Everything is made of *stuff*, you’re made of skin and bones and organs and blood and hair.
If you look at a bit of, say, skin, under a microscope, it has a couple of different layers and things going through it, and these are different kinds of tissue.
If you zoom the microscope even further, you’ll see each kind of tissue is made up of similar looking ‘building blocks’, these are called cells.
If you keep zooming in, cells are made of molecules, which are made of atoms. If something is made of all the same kind of atom we call it an element.
An atom is the smallest part of matter that can exist on its own. The periodic table of elements is a chart of all the different kinds of atoms that we know exist.
Atoms are made of subatomic particles – protons, which carry a positive electrical charge, electrons, which carry a negative charge, and neutrons, which carry no charge.
A quark is the next smallest particle down, it’s a part of a proton. If there’s an even smaller thing that makes up quarks then we don’t have the technology to observe it yet, so they’re one of the smallest things that we know exists. This makes them a *fundamental particle*. If something is fundamental that means it’s the base thing that everything else is built on.
Other kinds of fundamental particles are: Electrons, photons, muons, tau, electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, tau neutrinos, gluons, w bosons, z bosons, and higgs bosons
So fundamental particles make up subatomic particles, subatomic particles make up atoms, atoms make up molecules, and molecules make up stuff!
Here’s a song about quarks by Hank Green! https://youtu.be/RQ73z9wo6k8
Latest Answers