**Ask a monkey a physics question thread**

[MadMojoMonkey]

I look down at my hand. It's made of skin, flesh and bone. I look at my house, it's made of bricks.

But what, at the most fundamental level, is everything made out of?

Short answer: Everything is made of QUARKS, LEPTONS and BOSONS.

Your hand is made of organs, which are made of tissues, which are made of cells, which are made of molecules, which are made of atoms.
Bricks are far less complicated, but still made of atoms.

All that stuff is made of Up quarks, Down quarks and Electrons, which are the building blocks of atoms.

Atoms (from the Greek a tomos, "no cut" or "indivisible") were originally thought to be fundamental particles. To a chemist, in a way, they are, since there is no smaller bit that retains the chemical properties. However, this is a physics thread, not a chemistry thread, so let's break it all the way down.

Definition: A fundamental particle is a particle which does not have any constituent parts.

Atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons. Protons and neutrons are made of quarks. Electrons are leptons, which are fundamental particles. Electrons are fundamental particles.

There are 6 quarks (plus their anti-particles, making 12). They are called: Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top, Bottom
For the anti-particles, just add the prefix anti- to these 6 names.
Note that an anti-Up quark is not a Down quark.

A proton is made of 2 Up quarks and 1 Down quark.
A neutron is made of 1 Up quark and 2 Down quarks.

(Yes, DoubleJ, there are such things as Strange quarks and Charm quarks. They were named by the hippie physicists at Cal-Tech who first discovered them. Top and Bottom were almost named Truth and Beauty. True story. Also, and this is my favorite law of physics, there is a Law of Conservation of Strangeness.)

There are 6 leptons (plus their anti-particles, making 12). They are called: electron, muon, tau, electron neutrino, muon neutrino, tau neutrino.
For the anti-particles, just add the prefix anti- to these 6 names.
Note that an anti-electron is commonly called a positron, but either name is fine.

There are 4 fundamental bosons (maybe 5 if the Higgs boson is a fundamental boson). They are called: photon, gluon, Z boson, W boson
Note that bosons do not have anti- versions. Bosons are the force mediators between particles. For example, like charges repel each other and unlike charges attract each other by emitting and absorbing photons.