What is the world made of?…There are twelve basic building blocks.

Six of these are quarks—- they go by the interesting names of up, down, charm, strange, bottom and top. (A proton, for instance, is made of two up quarks and one down quark.) The other six are leptons—- these include the electron and its two heavier siblings, the muon and the tauon, as well as three neutrinos.

There are four fundamental forces in the universe: gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces. Each of these is produced by fundamental particles that act as carriers of the force…: …photon…graviton…eight…gluons…three…W+, … W- , … Z.

The behavior of all of these particles and forces is described with impeccable precision by the Standard Model, with one notable exception: gravity.

Alberto Güijosa

Tags: basic facts, fundamental, hadrons, leptons, physics, QCD, quarks, science, string theory, the standard model, the universe