How should a nonphysicist visualize quarks? As tiny spheres trapped inside atoms?
Well, in classical physics you could think of a quark as a point. In quantum mechanics a quark is not exactly a point; it’s quite a flexible object. Sometimes it behaves like a point, but it can be smeared out a little. Sometimes it behaves like a wave. When people picture particles smashing together in a particle collider, what should they be imagining? It’s not like billiard balls colliding, is it? It depends on the circumstances. At very high energies, two particles that smash together do not bounce off each other but create a vast number of particles. You would have all sorts of little chips flying off in all directions—that would be a little more like it. So it would be like smashing an apple and an orange together and getting bananas? No, no, no. Little bits of all kinds of things. Getting a whole bunch of little chips of apple and orange, but also chips of banana and antibanana, grapes… How many types of elementary particles are there? We have a thing called the standard model
