How charges and masses create the Universe around us | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Mar, 2025

1 1 minute read

In the very early Universe, there were tremendous numbers of quarks, leptons, antiquarks, and antileptons of all species. After only a tiny fraction-of-a-second has elapsed since the hot Big Bang, most of these matter-antimatter pairs annihilate away, leaving a very tiny excess of matter over antimatter. How that excess came about is a puzzle known as baryogenesis, and it is one of the greatest unsolved problems in modern physics. (Credit: E. Siegel/Beyond the Galaxy)

From the tiniest subatomic scales to the grandest cosmic structures of all, everything that exists depends on two things: charge and mass.

When we examine everything that exists, from atoms and molecules to macroscopic objects to planets and stars and even grander structures, we run into a fascinating puzzle: the fact that everything we see, observe, and know of is made from the same small set of fundamental particles. There are only a few dozen particles and antiparticles that exist as part of the Standard Model, along with the still-mysterious dark matter and dark energy. As simple as the Standard Model itself is, there are only a few particles that are required to understand almost everything:

the up-and-down quarks, which make up protons and neutrons,
the gluons, which hold protons, neutrons, and all atomic nuclei together,
the electrons, which bind with atomic nuclei to make neutral atoms,
the photon, which is the particle that mediates the electromagnetic force and is the quantum associated with light,
and the neutrino (and its antimatter counterpart, the antineutrino), playing a major role in the weak nuclear interaction but otherwise of relative unimportance, cosmically.

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