What are quarks made of? What are the things that make up quarks made of? How far down does it go?
In: Chemistry
It sure seems like there might be even more to learn, ‘below’ the level of quarks, right? We went from thinking particles/molecules were the smallest things, to thinking atoms were the smallest things, to thinking electrons and nucleons were the smallest things, to thinking quarks are.
We don’t know if this is the end of it or not, and we don’t know if there’s any ‘bottom’ to it either. Maybe quarks are the very smallest and most fundamental physical things that exist, or maybe there’s some hidden world of even *tinier* things which make up the quarks. Maybe this progression of smaller-and-smaller things goes ‘all the way down’, and there *is* no final, most-fundamental level of physics, and it’s all… fractal or something. We can only guess at possibilities like that for now; we don’t currently have evidence of anything below quarks.
Maybe someday, some experiments from CERN and LHC and friends, will force us to start building models for a system *underlying* the behaviour of quarks, and the results of those experiments could – somehow – give us cause to prefer some of those models over others.
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