What are quarks?

Quarks are tiny building blocks that make up bigger particles like protons and neutrons.

Imagine you have a super strong LEGO brick, that’s like a proton or neutron. But if you look really closely, it's not just one piece, it's made of even smaller pieces called quarks, like the little bricks inside the big one.

There are different kinds of quarks, and they team up in special ways. For example, a proton is made of three quarks, kind of like how you might use three small LEGO bricks to build something bigger. These quarks are always moving and interacting with each other.

Quarks don’t just hang out by themselves, they have a special kind of glue called the strong force, which keeps them together inside protons and neutrons. It’s like how sticky putty holds pieces of LEGO together so they don’t fall apart.

Even though you can't see quarks directly, scientists know they're there because they can see how protons and neutrons behave, it's like figuring out what's inside a puzzle box just by looking at how the pieces move!