Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

The hadrons are made up of quarks, which come in three pairs, up/
down, top/bottom, and strange/charm. Quarks and their associated
antiquarks can join together to form mesons, but usually, they
come together in triplets, creating baryons. There are 14 baryons,
including the proton and the neutron.
Breaking things down to their most elementary bits, from the six
quarks and the three leptons, we can build up all the particles we see.
Those particles interact, and theory accounts for their interactions
in terms of the exchange of other particles called bosons.
There are four gauge bosons, which carry the various forces
between fermions. The most famous is the photon or light particle,
which carries electromagnetic force between particles. Light is
thought of as a particle, a quantum of electromagnetic energy that
is emitted and absorbed by fermions or collections of them. This is
how forces allow particles to act on one another.
In this scheme, there was one element left out, the Higgs boson,
which was required to give mass to those particles that possess it. It
gave anomalous results. But if this boson was added to the mix,
boson in 2012, the standard model has been accepted as a nearly
complete account of the physical world.
The usual way of talking about the standard model makes us think
of the subatomic world as being composed of basic uncuttable
particles—the classical Greek atoms. But recall that this is coming
out of quantum mechanics. We can think of particles because we
are talking about quantized elements, but elements of what? Here is
where we return to de Broglie.
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