The invisible building blocks that form the core of your body

Science · Published 22 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: If you zoom into an atom, you find protons and neutrons. But zoom in further, and you reach the ultimate building blocks of visible matter. These point-like particles are quarks, the elementary components that define the very structure of our universe.

Quarks are considered elementary particles, meaning they are not composed of any smaller components. Unlike the atoms that make up our bodies, which consist of electrons orbiting a nucleus, quarks are the fundamental units found inside those nuclei. They are so small that they are essentially point-like, possessing almost no measurable size. The existence of quarks was first theorized in 1964 by physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig at the California Institute of Technology. These tiny entities reside deep within the atomic nuclei of every physical object. They serve as the foundational layer of the Standard Model. Scientists view them as the ultimate components of all visible matter.

Their work was not a sudden 'a-ha!' moment but rather the result of years of meticulous cataloging by the particle physics community. By the 1950s, scientists had built a massive library of known particles, similar to a botanical catalog, but they lacked a unifying theory to explain why these particles existed. This era of research focused on identifying the specific properties of every known particle. The community worked to organize these findings into a coherent system. This process eventually paved the way for the modern understanding of subatomic structures.

This search led to the Standard Model of particle physics. A major breakthrough occurred when physicists noticed that hyperons—unstable particles—were decaying into unexpected products. Because the behavior was so surprising, Gell-Mann identified a hidden quantum attribute, naming it 'strangeness'. Because quantum numbers like charge, spin, and strangeness must be conserved, this discovery helped establish the framework for understanding how quarks interact and form the matter we see today. The principle of conservation requires that the sum of these properties remains constant during decay. This rule forced physicists to account for the missing pieces in their equations. It ultimately provided the necessary evidence to validate the existence of quarks.

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