Electrons, quarks, photons, and gluons are the components of everything that sways in the space around us. They are the “elementary particles” studied in particle physics. To these particles a few others are added, such as the neutrinos, which swarm throughout the universe but have little interaction with us, and the “Higgs bosons,” recently detected in Geneva in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. But there are not many of these, fewer than ten types, in fact. A handful of elementary ingredients that act like bricks in a gigantic Lego set, and with which the entire material reality surrounding us
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