Eli5: What exactly are quarks…how many are there…and is there anything smaller?
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Quarks are currently believed to be some of the fundamental building blocks of everything. Fundamental meaning that they are not made of anything smaller than them.
Currently we have identified six types of Quarks called Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Charmed, and Strange
Quarks don’t exist alone in nature but rather combine to form more complex particles called Hadrons which include Protons and Neutrons that make up matter.
Other particles in the scale of quarks include the Electron and Photon (light)
There’s other fundamental particles that we know of besides these, lookup the ‘standard model’
Preons are hypothetical point particles that Quarks could be made out of, but so far we have no evidence to prove that anything smaller than Quarks exists.
String theory also postulates that Quarks are made of smaller particles, but again unproven
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