How do we know things don’t just get infinitely smaller? If a quark is the smallest particle we know of, what makes up a quark? And so on?

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It also makes me wonder if everything is actually the same? I know it’s a silly question, but are all quarks the same (composition wise) if so, does that mean that at our smallest core, we are made up of the same thing? Does this also mean that if not, that there is always going to be variance even to our smallest level? I suppose this question is asking more about what exactly is the composition of the smallest possible particle, and is there really an end?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I would suggest having a read about preons. To cite wikipedia

>However, scattering experiments have shown that quarks and leptons are “point like” down to distance scales of less than 10−18 m (or 1⁄1000 of a proton diameter). The momentum uncertainty of a preon (of whatever mass) confined to a box of this size is about 200 GeV/c, which is 50,000 times larger than the (model dependent) rest mass of an up-quark, and 400,000 times larger than the rest mass of an electron

This could be fixed by extremely fine-tuned binding energy but is not very elegant. Additionally, we did not observe any resonances corresponding to existing states of quarks. This can also be solved by an extremely high binding energy, but that would also require extreme fine tuning

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