quark
Quarks are tiny bricks that make up everything around us. Like flour in dough, they come together to create protons and neutrons – the building blocks of atoms.
History
The idea of quarks was born in 1964 when American physicist Murray Gell-Mann (and independently George Zweig) proposed that all nuclear particles consist of smaller objects with fractional electric charge.
How it works
Quarks interact via the strong force by exchanging gluons. It's like a team ping-pong game: quarks toss 'balls' – gluons – back and forth and thereby hold together inside hadrons.
💡 Quarks are real invisibles: they have never been seen alone, they always stick together in groups, like inseparable friends!