Elementary Particles

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Elementary Particles, in physics, particles that cannot be broken down into any other particles. The term elementary particles also is used more loosely to include some subatomic particles that are composed of other particles. Particles that cannot be broken further are sometimes called fundamental particles to avoid confusion. These fundamental particles provide the basic units that make up all matter and energy in the universe.

Scientists and philosophers have sought to identify and study elementary particles since ancient times. Aristotle and other ancient Greek philosophers believed that all things were composed of four elementary materials: fire, water, air, and earth. People in other ancient cultures developed similar notions of basic substances. As early scientists began collecting and analyzing information about the world, they showed that these materials were not fundamental but were made of other substances.

In the 1800s British physicist John Dalton was so sure he had identified the most basic objects that he called them atoms (from the Greek word for “indivisible”). By the early 1900s scientists were able to break apart these atoms into particles that they called the electron and the nucleus. Electrons surround the dense nucleus of an atom. In the 1930s, researchers showed that the nucleus consists of smaller particles, called the proton and the neutron. Today, scientists have evidence that the proton and neutron are themselves made up of even smaller particles, called quarks.

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