Everything you have ever touched uses just three particles from this table: the up quark, the down quark and the electron. The other fourteen are heavier, short-lived, and surface only in accelerators or cosmic rays. Six quarks and six leptons fall into three generations, each heavier and less stable than the one before; uud makes a proton, udd makes a neutron. Gravity appears nowhere in the table, and that is the Standard Model’s largest gap.
Everything you have ever touched uses just three particles from this table: the up quark, the down quark and the electron. The other fourteen are heavier, short-lived, and surface only in accelerators or cosmic rays. Six quarks and six leptons fall into three generations, each heavier and less stable than the one before; uud makes a proton, udd makes a neutron. Gravity appears nowhere in the table, and that is the Standard Model’s largest gap.
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