For my first upload to this blog, I would like to talk about the building blocks of universe: fundamental particles. Fundamental particles are the smallest known particle and cannot be broken down into anything smaller. Scientists once thought that the electron, the proton and the neutron were the fundamental particles but with the invention of the particle accelerator we found out that, out of the three, only electrons were the fundamental particles.

Fundamental particles contain 3 sections: leptons, quarks and gauge bosons. Leptons consist of the electron, muon and tau and their neutrino counterparts. Gauge bosons are associated with the four fundamental forces, with only the boson for gravity remaining undiscovered. However, the most well-known fundamental particles, the ones that make up almost all of the matter in the observable universe, are quarks.

Quarks are the building block of matter. In the standard model, there are 6 “flavours” of quarks called: the up quark, down quark, charm quark, strange quark, top quark and bottom quark. The up, charm and top quarks have a contain a +2/3 charge while down, strange and bottom quarks have a -1/3 charge. Quarks make up protons and neutrons, with the former having 2 up quarks and 1 down quark and the latter having 1 up quark and 2 down. Only up, down and strange quarks have been found within normal matter but the existence of other quark flavours has been proven through the particle accelerator. Scientists expect the other quarks to be found in stars.

 Most matter can be separated into 2 sections: leptons, another fundamental particle that I will talk about in another article, and hadrons, matter made up of quarks. Hadrons can be further split into 2 sections: baryons, matter made up of three quarks, and mesons, matter made up of 2 quarks (one quark and another anti-quark). Antiparticles are the exact same particle and have the same mass but the opposite charge, lepton number, baryon number and strangeness.

Baryons have a baryon number of 1 meaning that all quarks have a baryon number of +1/3. Mesons, on the other hand, have a baryon number of zero as they are not baryons. To form this, they have a quark and its antiquark each cancelling its opposite particles baryon number. For example, let’s say we have an up quark and a down anti-quark and they form to become a meson. An up quark has a charge of +2/3 and a baryon number of +1/3. A down anti-quark, however, has a charge of +1/3 and a baryon number of -1/3 due to the properties of anti-particles saying that they have the opposite baryon number and charge. This means that the meson will have a charge of +1 but a baryon number of 0.

As the first article on this website, it would be fitting that we journey back to the beginning of the universe.

‘What was there before the Big Bang?’ That’s a question that both kids and adults love to pose to anyone who seems sympathetic. After all, if the universe has only been around for roughly 14 billion years, isn’t it legitimate to ask what was in existence before the mother-of-all-events cranked up the cosmos? –  Seth Shostak

The above picture shows the background radiation levels of the observable universe. This radiation is remnants of the ancient event that created our universe. Thirteen billion years ago the Universe began in the event called the Big Bang. We don’t know why. We also don’t know why it took the initial form that it did. This is one of the unsolved mysteries that makes fundamental physics so exciting. The first milestone we can speak of in anything resembling scientific language is known as the Planck Era, a period that occurred 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds after the Big Bang. This number can be arrived at simply because it is related to the strength of the gravitational force. It is so incredibly tiny because gravity is so weak. At that time, the four fundamental forces – gravity, the strong and weak nuclear force, and electromagnetism – were one. There was no matter, only energy and the super force.

As the Universe rapidly expanded and cooled it underwent a series of symmetry-breaking event. The first saw gravity separate from the other fundamental forces so the prefect symmetry of the Planck Era was broken. After this, the strong nuclear force separated which resulted in the end of the Grand Unification Era. At this point, the Universe underwent a violent growth, expanding by a factor of 100 million million million million times in an unimaginably small time. This was when sub-atomic particles entered the universe.

After these events, one of the most important events in the creation of our universe occurred: the breaking of the electroweak symmetry. During this time, the sub-atomic building blocks of all we can see gained mass via the Higgs Boson, recently discovered at the Large Hadron Collider.

There is now one final step needed to arrive at the protons and neutrons – the building blocks of the elements. This began around a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, when the quarks had cooled enough to be glued together to form the protons and neutrons. After three minutes the universe consisted of two elements; the majority hydrogen and a small amount of helium. At this point the main process of creation was complete, with the universe consisting of 75% hydrogen and about 25% helium, and with the four fundamental forces having been separated.

Check out our other posts:

• The Building Blocks Of The Universe
• The Creation of the Universe