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Asked by iscientist to Chris, Eva, Michael, Paddy, Philip on 16 Jun 2011.
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Chris Jordan answered on 15 Jun 2011:
The way we currently think (called the standard model) protons and neutrons are made of quarks (elementary particles),
electrons are also elementary – they can’t be broken down into smaller bits – and they are much smaller than protons etc. Neutrinos are like uncharged electrons – they have very low mass.
Photons don’t have mass – but a lot of the time we don’t think of them as particles.ps the infamous Higg’s Boson is a big particle
pps “elections” are made of fundamental parties 🙂.
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Eva Bachmair answered on 15 Jun 2011:
I remember my brother telling me about particles and quarks and stuff. But again, Chris is the safest bet for this question.
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Philip Denniff answered on 15 Jun 2011:
My hero, J J Thomson was the first person to weigh an electron just over 100 years ago with a mass spectrometer. Then it was the smallest particle know. His answer was very very accurate and has only recently been changed. He is my hero because I use a mass spectrometer to measure the amount of drug in blood samples.
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Paddy Brock answered on 16 Jun 2011:
Thanks Chris, good to know. Hundreds of years ago this would have been a question for biologists!
One of my heroes of early science is Robert Hooke, who did some of the earliest studies with a microscope in 1665. He was the one who first called cells “cells”, which were the smallest things to be described by science back then. Before then “cell” meant the small rooms that monks slept in, and the cells Hooke saw under the microscope looked like small monks’ rooms to him.
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Michael Wharmby answered on 16 Jun 2011:
Yep I second Chris’ answer. The fundamental particles are quarks (making up neutrons and protons), leptons (including electrons, positrons and neutrinos) and bosons (which transfer forces – like electromagnetism (photons), gravity (gravitons) or of course the Higgs (mass)).
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