Transcript

This week, we’re going to be examining the very small. What are the building blocks from which our universe is made? Each generation has pulled matter apart, finding ever smaller ingredients that make up the physical world. The ancient Greeks thought that everything was made from earth, wind, fire and water. That was superseded by the theory of atoms, and the periodic table listing the ingredients for the molecular world. Atoms gave way to electrons, protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons gave way to quarks. We believe this is the bottom layer. As you’ll discover this week, the key to the current understanding of the building blocks of matter is the mathematics of symmetry. But are quarks really the final chapter? Or is it just the hubris of the current generation of scientists? How could we ever know when we’d really hit the truly indivisible?