Lepton−1 charge
Electron
Light, negative, and found in the fuzzy space around a nucleus.
Start small. Really small.
Everything is made of tiny things.
Three particles are enough to begin building nearly everything you can touch.
Scroll to shrink
01 / The pieces
Meet the three that matter here.
Quark+⅔ charge
Up quark
A tiny ingredient locked inside protons and neutrons.
Quark−⅓ charge
Down quark
The up quark’s partner. Different charge, same crucial job.
02 / The build
Now, make an atom.
Step 01
Quarks group up.
Three quarks bind tightly together. Their mix decides what they become.
2 up + 1 down → proton
1 up + 2 down → neutron
1 up + 2 down → neutron
UPUPDOWN
Step 02
Nucleons huddle.
Protons and neutrons pack into a tiny, heavy center: the nucleus.
protons + neutrons → nucleus
PROTONNEUTRON
Step 03
Electrons surround it.
Not on neat little tracks—inside probability clouds. Together, that’s an atom.
nucleus + electrons → atom
03 / The rules change
Atoms behave oddly.
Not magic. Just quantum mechanics.
Experiment 01
Double slit
Send particles one at a time. Together, they build a wave-like interference pattern.
Experiment 02
Quantum tunneling
A particle can sometimes appear beyond a barrier it classically cannot cross.
Experiment 03
Bell tests
Entangled particles show correlations stronger than any local hidden plan can explain.