ELI5; why are we taught that atoms are the building blocks of matter when atoms are made up of smaller things?
In: Chemistry
Atoms are the smallest building blocks of chemistry. You can always split things down by chemical reactions further and further and further until you have the elemental (atomic) forms (albeit briefly in some cases if they can stick to themselves). You can predict how those elements will behave in a straightforwardish way with nothing more complex than a periodic table.
Yes, if you go to physics, you can get smaller (protons, neutrons and electrons) and then smaller still (quarks and the rest of the menagerie) and potentially smaller still (strings? brane Intersections? Who knows) but those things don’t affect human scale chemical reactions so can be discarded at an introductory level. At uni level, chemistry uses quantum physics (of course) but the calculations are… unpleasant.
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