• Question: what do you think is probably inside a quark or is it nothing?

    Asked by anon-244307 to Ondrej, Jordan, Eleanor, Ed, Christine, Alice on 17 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Jordan McElwee

      Jordan McElwee answered on 17 Mar 2020:

      As far as we know quarks are fundamental (ie. there is nothing inside them). This means they aren’t made up of any other particles (like a proton is made of quarks, for example). The way we can look for this is if quarks become ‘excited’ and have more energy states (this is what CERN are doing), however we have seen no evidence for this yet!

    • Photo: Eleanor Jones

      Eleanor Jones answered on 18 Mar 2020:

      At the moment, it looks like it’s nothing. All the evidence points to them being fundamental. But for a long time, scientists thought protons and neutrons were fundamental, until they discovered quarks so there always a possibility we’re wrong!

    • Photo: Ondrej Kovanda

      Ondrej Kovanda answered on 18 Mar 2020:

      With our current understanding, quarks are fundamental, elementary particles with nothing inside. It’s also true, that whenever in the past we thought something was fundamental and elementary, we were wrong. Let’s wait and see 🙂

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