Eli5: What exactly are quarks…how many are there…and is there anything smaller?
In: 47
Quarks are a type of fundamental particle in the same way that atoms are made of electrons, protons, and neutrons. There are 6 types of quarks and 6 types of leptons (e.g. electrons). Anything made of leptons and quarks is a type of matter; anything made of other things, like bosons, is not.
There are 6 types of quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom. Other than the top, all of them could be found in a normal-sized piece of matter if you looked hard enough.
Quarks have a charge (positive or negative), a color (red, green, or blue), and a quark-ness (up or down). Electrons have a charge and a quark-ness, but no color. Protons and neutrons are made of quarks: protons have 2 ups and a down, neutrons have 2 downs and an up. So if you put enough of them together in the right way you could make anything out of them.
Quarks get their name from James Joyce. The scientist who named them was a fan and wrote in a note to a colleague that he found them to be as distant from reality as the fictitious Quark.
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