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Asked by 552rdme39 to Adrian, Gaia, Jim, Scott, Vicky on 7 Mar 2016.
Question: what are Quarks made from
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Adrian Buzatu answered on 7 Mar 2016:
Quarks are elementary particle. Elementary means that they are not made of smaller particles. Quarks are point-like. They have some properties, though: electric charge, mass, plus others purely quantic, like spin, color charge, etc.
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Scott Lawrie answered on 8 Mar 2016:
We think quarks aren’t made from anything. Just like electrons, we think quarks are the smallest thing you can get and cannot be broken up into anything even smaller.
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Jim Barrett answered on 9 Mar 2016:
As far as we are aware, quarks are just quarks! You can’t go any smaller than a quark.
Comments
552rdme39 commented on :
if they can not be broken down then what causes the differences between the six different types
Scott commented on :
Wow that’s a great and rather complicated question! There are all kinds of silly words to do with quarks: flavour, colour, charm, strangeness, isospin… and it can quickly get confusing so I won’t write too much here – you can go look up more if you wish. The main differences are their masses. Early particle physicists started making particles that were much heavier and ‘stranger’ than ordinary protons and neutrons and a new type of particle (the strange quark) was needed to explain the measured differences. Bigger experiments made particles that couldn’t be explained by a strange quark to another ‘charm’ quark was added to the list… and so on and so on until the heaviest ‘Top’ quark. You can think of them like Lego blocks: with only two shapes of Lego blocks, there are only so many things you can make. Adding a different shape block opens up a whole you range of building opportunities! Same with quarks being the building blocks of particle physics.
I hope that beings to answer your excellent question!
552rdme39 commented on :
okay thanks