The query of what protons or neutrons are made up of has an apparently easy reply: quarks and gluons. However, in relation to atoms’ third element, electrons, the reply shouldn’t be as straightforward.
That’s as a result of, so far as we all know, electrons are elementary particles. In different phrases, they don’t have any smaller elements. That’s not one thing that may be completely confirmed, but it surely’s actually what the out there proof suggests. This raises the rather more tough query of what’s the composition of a elementary particle, and the way does it differ between electrons and others?
The phrase “atom” comes from the Greek for “unable to be lower”, primarily based on the thinker Democritus’s reasoning that matter have to be composed of one thing so small it couldn’t be additional divided. Twenty-three centuries later, we found that the objects we referred to as atoms weren’t in truth atoms in Democritus’s sense, having not less than two, and except for hydrogen, three, smaller elements.
Once the composition of protons and neutrons was revealed, it was straightforward to suspect that this was a case of “turtles all the best way down”; we might preserve discovering smaller and smaller particles that made up every degree we found. Indeed, some might need thought of it boastful to suppose they had been a part of the era to have found the true elementary particles.
However, electrons have resisted this type of infinite regression; 125 years after their discovery, there isn’t a signal of something smaller inside them. Attempts to search out some element particles contain each smashing electrons in opposition to different electrons and seeing in the event that they launch something, and looking for inner construction at very excessive energies. Neither method has revealed something inside.
In the meantime, we realized that electrons, like the whole lot that small, are each particles and waves.
Some hypothetical element particles have been proposed for electrons, however the physics they depend on doesn’t match as properly with what we see because the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Although the Standard Model is usually thought to not be an entire description of actuality, with particles not included inside it suspected to exist, the basic nature of the electron shouldn’t be one of many elements that pulls widespread doubts.
Given how a lot lighter electrons are than the particles of an atomic nucleus, it’s not so stunning they’re not made up of something lighter.
So, if electrons don’t have any smaller particles to compose them, is there some type of indivisible materials from which they’re fashioned, some electronia, maybe?
This is the purpose the place it turns into laborious to visualise (even for individuals who don’t have aphantasia). Rather than having some kind of matter to make them up, physicists describe elementary particles as an excitation of a subject. In a uncommon effort to help understanding, within the case of the electron, this is called the electron subject.
Interactions of this subject with different fields give electrons their properties. For instance, it’s the Higgs subject that offers particles, together with electrons, their mass.
Describing one thing as an excitation of a subject isn’t a really satisfying reply for non-physicists. Unfortunately, or maybe luckily, the universe doesn’t actually do issues for the sake of our satisfaction, and it’s the most effective description we’ve got.
