The universe
Absolutely everything, from the building blocks up to galaxies and from the beginning to the end of time.
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
Douglas Adams in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Part 1. The building blocks of the universe
When the Greek such as Democritus and Leucippus were considering matter, they hypothesised that if you were to continually cut a matter in half, you would eventually come to something that is uncuttable. Since A- means not and Tomos means to cut, “atom” means cannot be cut. This giving us, at least hypothetical, the fundamental building blocks of reality. But it wasn’t until 1908-1913 that the observation of Brownian motion by Jean-Baptise Perrin proved that atoms existed.
Leuippus thought there were Earth, Air, Fire and Water, but in Modern Chemistry there are 92 naturally occurring elements and a further 26 artificially made and extremely short lived elements. More about these elements in Part 2.
In 1897 JJ Thompson realised the uncuttable atoms had a substructure in the form of the electron. Which really makes the term atom invalid, but we are stuck with it.
From the efforts of Rutherford and Chadwick, have now reached the subatomic world. Atoms can be broken up into Electrons and Nuclei, the nucleus can be further broken into protons and neutrons. Then in 1968 experiments at SLAC showed protons and neutrons have internal structure, in the form of up and down quarks. So really the building blocks of the universe are three particles, electrons, up quarks and down quarks, one less than the original four elements of earth, air, fire and water.
When we do further particle collider experiments, trying to smash these particle apart to see if they have a substructure we find they cannot be broken. Electrons and quarks appear to be fundamental, in that they are not made up of anything else.
However, the energy involved in these collisions instead of breaking the particle up actually ends up make new, highly unstable short lived particles.
We get Muons, these are a lot like electrons, they are just more massive. they quickly break down into electrons. Then there is another particle like the muon again more massive and more unstable called the tau particle. Again these decay very quickly into muon and finally into electrons.
We also get some weird, ghostly very low mass and uncharged particles called neutrons. With an electron neutron, a muon neutron and a tau neutron. these six particles that form the Leptons. See the orange.
There are a huge number of neutrinos around. They are released in Nuclear reactions such as that which happens in the centre of the sun. Hold your thumb up in the direction of the sun and 65 billion neutrons pass through your nail every second. But their ghostly nature means they are barely there, since they very very rarely interact. Neutrinos would get through a piece of concrete the length of the solar system and not notice it. Even piece of concrete 5 light years long, larger than the distance to the next solar system, and only half of those neutrinos would have hit it. Take another 5 light years concrete for them to halve again, I think you get the picture.
So we have our six leptons, the election, mourn and tau particle each with their own type of neutrino. The up and down quarks also have exotic high energy unstable partners. When some particles had strongly long life time, the strange quark was found. Just like the up and down where partners it was thought charming when the strange quark had fourth quark to join it, the charm quark. Then to compete the symmetry with the six leptons it was thought there should be a fifth and sixth quarks. So when the fifth was found it made the idea true, the truth quark, and the sixth made the whole beautiful, the beauty quark. Unfortunately truth and beauty are less common names and they are more commonly referred to as top and bottom. But I prefer the elegance of those less common names.
With the six leptons and six quarks we have all the matter in the universe. However, each of these particle also has an anti matter partner, which will annihilate its matter partner when they meet, turning into energy. The reverse is also possible, with energy randomly turning into matter and anti matter pairs, pair production. This is a background effect over the whole universe with these particle popping into and out of existence all the time e on really short time scales.
As a big fan of board games I will to use the analogy that space is like the board, then the quarks and leptons that form matter are like the pieces on the board. The final piece of the building blocks come in the way these pieces interact with each other. Since we are dealing with the quantum model of reality where everything is made up of individual quanta or particles then the forces also follow this pattern, so forces are fundamentally the exchange of particles, l between other particles (see the gauge bosons in red above). With each of the four fundamental forces in the universe having its own particles.
The electromagnetic force, or the forces between charges, is communicate by the charges exchanging virtual photons between them. The strong nuclear force which acts between quarks and sticks quarks together is done by gluons and the Pi-zero. This force is also the reason why we never see quarks on their own, they only exist stuck to other quarks via the string force, forming barons and mesons. Finally we have the weak force, with its W-, W+ and Zo particles. This interacts with both leptons and quarks, allowing things like radioactive beta decay to happen.
Now if you were paying attention you’d notice I have only mentioned three of the four fundamental forces, the fourth force Gravity hasn’t come up. While everything I have mentioned here is experimentally confirmed, and forms the basis of all electricity, magnetism, contact forces, nuclear energy and decay etc, really everything except gravity. The particle for gravity, the graviton, is only hypothetic and we don’t have any evidence that it actually exists.
Gravity also plays by different rules, there is a completely separate theory called general relativity which describes how gravity works, and it works really well. Then we also have this standard model and quantum mechanics of all these particle which works for everything else. Gravity and Quantum speak entirely different mathematical languages and are entirely incompatible with each other. Quantum mechanics will give us the probably that an event will occur and it predictions have an amazing degree off accuracy when compared to experiment. Add general relativity and gravity into quantum causes maths spits out probability of infinity, which is nonsense.
Now most of the time this doesn’t matter because when we are dealing with tiny particle at the quantum scale, gravity is so tiny it makes no difference. When are dealing with really large things when gravity is important the quantum effects are so tiny they make no difference. The only time this is an issue is when you have larger amounts of mass or energy confined to quantum scales. This happened at the very beginning of our universe and in the singularities at the centre of black holes. Which is why we have absolute no idea what happens there. We do know what happened shortly after the beginning of the universe, as our particle collider experiment recreate those energy densities, just on a small scale. We get all the particle we mention earlier coming into existence, eventually settling down, and up and down quarks are all thats left from the quarks, they settle into protons and neutrons the electron later joining them form atoms, and our building blocks for our universe are made.
But the very beginning to the universe is a mystery. For some this the realm of god, and it might be forever unknowable. But I hold out up that future generation of physicists will unlock the quantum theory of gravity, or theory of everything and tell us more about the beginning of time and space, and what happens inside a black hole, maybe even telling us more about the creation of the universe and fully "know the mind of god.
"
In Part 2 we will look at Stars, galaxies and universe from just after the beginning to its probable end.
Lander Bennewith MSc PGCE QTS
Dr Andy Gibson
BSc PGCE QTS MSc PhD
My availability rates and contact details.
Find out more about my background in physics and education.
After A-level and GSCE resources?
Check out our free worksheets.
Take a look at how online tutoring works and other FAQs.
Contact:
Andy +447740 366007
Lander +447449 690051
Copyright © 2026 Andy Gibson. All Rights Reserved.
Address: 42 Gunthorpe Road, NG4 4JF
Contact:
Andy +447740 366007
Copyright © 2026 Dr Andrew Gibson. All Rights Reserved.
Address: 42 Gunthorpe Road, NG4 4JF, UK