The universe
Absolutely everything, from the building blocks up to galaxies and from the beginning to the end of time.
Douglas Adams in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
When we are trying to understand the world around us, it can be very daunting with all its complexity and interacting systems. Here I will attempt to simplify the whole thing to its fundamental building blocks.
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. A- means not, Tomos means to cut, so “atom” means cannot be cut. This giving us the hypothetical fundamental building blocks of reality.
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 uncharge 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.
Lander Bennewith MSc PGCE QTS
Dr Andrew Gibson
BSc PGCE QTS MSc PhD
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Contact:
Andrew +447740 366007
Copyright © 2026 Andrew Gibson. All Rights Reserved.
Address: 42 Gunthorpe Road, NG4 4JF, UK