Forget about turtles; for all practical purposes, it’s really particles all the way down.
Whether as the protons and neutrons that help form chemical elements, the photons that we perceive as light or even the flows of electrons that power our smartphones, subatomic particles constitute essentially everything any of us will ever experience. Ironically, however, because they’re so minuscule, the particles underpinning our everyday reality tend to escape our notice—and our comprehension.
Consider the seemingly simple matter of their size, the very thing that makes them so alien. We’re typically taught to imagine any and all particles as tiny, colorful spheres, as if they were solid things that we could lay a ruler alongside to determine their dimensions like we’d do for any other physical object in the world. But subatomic particles don’t actually look like that at all. And while, for the largest particles, there are ways to measure “size” in a very general sense, for those that are smaller and ostensibly more “fundamental,” the concept of size itself is so slippery that it becomes almost meaningless.
Still, if Google queries are any guide, people really do want to know “What’s the smallest particle in the universe?” Never mind that the better question might be “Is there any point in asking?”
To read more, click here.