In the V Century b.C., there was a philosopher called Democritus. He had an idea of what everything around us is made of, creating the word "atom", that in Greek means "indivisible, with no parts". This idea inspired a new way of thinking: the atomism.
But, what is an atom?
It's clear we don´t use correctly the word "atom", because in our lenguage and when we use it in chemistry and in physics, it's made of three main parts: electrons, a nucleus and empty space. The elementary particles are the real atoms, but they're still a mystery. We don´t know its structure (we don't even know if they have one, they can be mathematical points!) and how many are there. But we know some things about it. The figure below shows the three generations of matter: electron, muon and t-lepton, with the quarks, neutrinos and bosons.
Types of Elementary Particles
There are two kind of particles: Fermions and Bosons-
-Fermions: The "bricks" that make the matter. There are divided in leptons (like electrons) and quarks (up, down, charm... three quarks make a proton or a neutron (depends on the type of quark).).
-Bosons: They are responsible for the forces between the particles. The lattest discover in particle physics is the "Higgs Boson", that gives mass to the matter.
This is all about a general introduction to elementary particles, we will later upload a new article about the Higgs Boson, that has become really famous thanks to the experiments made in the CERN's LHC in
Geneva, Switzerland.
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