Meet the subatomic particles

Chapter 1

Matter's inner recipe

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Chapter 2

The lightweight wanderers

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Chapter 3

The force carriers

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Chapter 4

The mass giver

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Chapter 5

Beyond the standard model

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YOUR GOAL

Master of Meet the subatomic particles

Ch 1 · Matter's inner recipe

hue The sticky glue of color charge

hue Six flavors of cosmic ingredients

Tiny Matter Mixer

hue Tiny Matter Mixer

hue The search for the smallest pieces

hue The Standard Model

Try to pull a single quark and snap the gluon thread, You'll only make a brand-new pair of quarks right there instead.

hue Making a proton from scratch

The sticky glue of color charge

hue The sticky glue of color charge

Fun Fact

Quark naming history: Murray Gell-Mann named 'quarks' after a whimsical line about 'three quarks for Muster Mark' in James Joyce's 1939 novel Finnegans Wake.

Six flavors of cosmic ingredients

hue Six flavors of cosmic ingredients

Glossary

quark (noun)
Any of a class of subatomic particles that carry a fractional electric charge and are the building blocks of hadrons. In 1964, Murray Gell-Mann proposed this particle, which interacts with leptons and bosons to form atomic structure.

Quiz

What combination of quarks makes up a single proton?

Gossip

Which quark flavor has the coolest sounding name?

Quiz

Which two physicists independently proposed the existence of quarks in 1964?

Quiz

What literary work inspired the name of the subatomic quark?

Quiz

What are the three types of 'color charge' that quarks carry?

Quiz

What is the collective name for particles made of bound quarks, such as protons and neutrons?

Quiz

Why can scientists never observe a single quark on its own?

Quiz

What combination of quarks makes up a single neutron?

Quiz

Which of the six quark flavors is the heaviest, weighing about as much as a gold atom?