Quantum Particles with Dr. Jason Lisle

Okay, and now I've hit the go live, so we should be good. All right, so let's get started here. I am Terry cameras. Oh and I'm here. On behalf of creation fellowship Santee we're a group of friends bound by our common agreement that the creation account as told in Genesis is a true depiction of how God created the earth and all life in just six days, about 6000 years ago.

We used to meet in person at the creation and Earth History Museum in Santee California, but took to this online platform in June of 2020 and haven't looked back. God has blessed us with presentations by many talented people who love the Lord and have a message to share.

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Tonight we're excited to welcome back our friend and fan favorite Dr. Jason Lyle. Dr Lyle is an astrophysicist and founder of the Biblical Science Institute. As a perpetual student of the Word of God, he also teaches and writes on other topics such as Herman, the hermeneutics of Genesis, the mathematic patterns of nature, general creation apologetics, and now homeschool students and adults alike are learning more and more to pattern their thinking after the mind of God thanks to Dr Lyle's introduction to logic curriculum.

But tonight we invite you to put on your thinking caps and pull out your air microscopes, as we travel from the vast knowledge of God and the great expanse of the heavens down to explore the tiniest theoretical constructs we believe to exist quantum particles.

If you have questions if you're watching on Facebook or if you're in zoom and you have questions for Dr Lyle that you'd like us to ask him after his presentation during the live q amp a, you can post them into the into the chat on zoom or into the comments on Facebook and we'll keep an eye on those and ask him those.

So, with that, Dr Lyle, it's, it's your turn.

Introduction to Quantum Particles

Okay, what's good to be with you this evening, virtually, and talk about quantum particles. The quantum physics is the, the branch of physics that deals with the very very small, and how, how the universe behaves at the smallest scale smaller than atoms.

And I think, I guess I guess I'm attracted to the extremes of physics I like the universe because it's as big as you can get physically and then quantum is as small as you can get in terms of structure the rest is just filler so I like the extremes I guess.

And although I didn't end up specializing in quantum, when I got my PhD in astrophysics, it's something that I find very interesting. And I hope that my enjoyment and interest in the topic will will will be appreciated I hope that you'll find it interesting and enjoyable as well, because the field is so vast in terms of the information, quantum mechanics is a wonderful, interesting field, but it's difficult.

And that's because many of the aspects of quantum particles are counterintuitive. And so I'm going to have necessity have to limit the topic tonight and I'm just going to limit it to really elementary particles and some of the ways that they combine an elementary particle is a particle that is not made of anything smaller.

Hopefully, anyone I think who's graduated from high school would know that we're made of molecules and then molecules are made of atoms, atoms are made of electrons circling around the exterior and then the nucleus you got protons and neutrons.

And those atoms are composite particles because they're made of something smaller, but there are particles that the Lord created that as far as we can tell are not made of anything smaller. And so those are the particles that I'm going to discuss this evening, and I'll give you just enough of the background of quantum mechanics that you need to know to be able to understand these particles obviously there's a lot more that I could cover but I rehearsed this a couple times and went far longer than you will want to listen to me so, and I have some illustrations to I think that will make this a little more tractable.

So here we have an illustration this is a illustrate schematic of a helium atom so you have the electrons there's two and a helium atom if it's neutral, and they're orbiting around the nucleus, this is not to scale the nucleus actually would be invisible at this scale it's very tiny compared to the size of the atom.

And then the, the protons and neutrons in the nucleus of that atom are also composite they're made of smaller particles called quarks. And so our goal this evening is to introduce you to the elementary particles that are known or suspected to exist.

There are only 38. And these are, these are the elementary particles that we know to exist and one has not yet been experimentally detected. But, yeah, so that's it. And already you can see that they're not random they're, they're organized into the I can organize them into this chart because they fall into natural sort of families and families of families.

And that's one of the takeaways that I want you to get from this presentation is that the particles that God created and allows to exist and they can they can transform into other particles but it's always these 38, these are the 38 particles that as far as we know are made of nothing smaller.

Already you can see that they're divided into two broad families bosons and for me on so you can see that at the top there just under elementary particles. Those are the two major families within the family of fermions there are two or four families depending on how you look at it you have leptons and quarks then you have anti leptons and anti quarks.

And then under the bosons there are sort of five families of bosons four of which are are connected to fundamental forces, and then there's the Higgs boson and it's just weird it's kind of, it's kind of an outlier it's there, but nonetheless these particles exist, and the way they exist makes life possible, and it shows something about the creativity of God.

Obviously the particles don't look like this, this is just a schematic to help us kind of remember it, and I use colors to indicate things like electric charge, just kind of gives us something visual.

I'm a visual learner so hopefully that's helpful to you as well. And so there are three takeaways that I want you to get tonight because as we study these particles, the details, they're fascinating, but it gets complicated.

And so I don't want you to get lost in the details there are three takeaways that if at any point you say I didn't quite follow that. Make sure you get these three takeaways. First of all, elementary particles exist in a nested hierarchy, a nested hierarchy hierarchy means there's, there's an orderliness to us like a family tree, but it's a nested hierarchy you can have families within families.

And that's significant because in the world of biology, you can also do that taxonomy, that's all about classifying organisms and we find that they occur in a nested hierarchy which is why you can, we can have you know kingdom file in class order family genus species and you can have organisms that are in the same family but they're, you know, different genus and so on.

You can do that with quantum particles too. And I find that interesting because secularists evolutionists like to say that the nested hierarchy we see in the world of biology is due to evolution. And that's the only explanation for it is the reason we can organize organisms into similarities and differences families families of families is because they have evolved from a common ancestor through gradual changes over millions of years of reproduction.

You can't do that with particles because there are only 38 elementary particles, that's it. And they don't evolve electrons do not gradually you know they don't reproduce and then gradually gain weight until they eventually become a muon particles particles unlike animals can decay they can change into other particles instantly but it's always some combination of the 38 particles that exist, everything in the physical universe is made of those 38 particles, or some combination thereof.

So, that is a powerful demonstration that the evolutionists are wrong that a nested hierarchy can only be explained by evolution, you can't do that with particles. Secondly, the particles, the properties of these particles are highly mathematical in nature.

Some of these particles were predicted to exist on the basis of math, before they were discovered. I think that's wild. You can't do that in biology. Nobody predicted the existence of an elephant based on some equation, but there are particles that were predicted to exist on the basis of a solution to an equation that were subsequently discovered empirically experimentally and confirmed.

I think that's amazing. The positron was predicted to exist before it was discovered the top quark was predicted to exist on the basis of math and secularist can't really explain why the universe of based math at all.

And it gets particularly sticky when we deal with quantum particles that are so highly mathematical we can actually predict in many cases which kinds exist. That's pretty neat. And that makes sense in a Christian worldview because God's mind upholds the universe, and God thinks mathematically.

That's why math applies to the physical universe. And then third, the properties of these particles are exactly right for chemistry and biology for chemistry to be what it is and therefore biology for that to be possible.

I'm not big on fine tuning arguments. There's nothing wrong with them I just tend not to use them because normally it's hard to say what the range is like the earth is the right distance from the sun for life that's true.

But how, how precise is it if we if we move the earth 5 closer could life still survive. If we move it 10 further away, could life still survive. That's hard to estimate because whether climate it's complex, and the robustness of life is complex, but with particles because because quantum particles obey these math equations perfectly, we can tell what they would be like if they were a little bit different if you made the up quark a little bit more massive we can tell what it would do.

And we know that in many instances life wouldn't be possible if these things were just a little bit different from the way they are. And so it really gives you a glimpse into the magnificence of the mind of God to think of all these interactions in such a way that makes the universe the way he wants it to be remarkable.

So those are the takeaways. And so let's get into some of the, some of the details I guess one of the things that that I need to start with, is the properties of quantum particles they often have mass.

We have a feel for that we understand mass, you know if you if you're more massive you weigh more on the scale and so on. Particles can quantum particles can have mass although some of them do not have mass, there are massless quantum particles where if you were to stop them, they would weigh nothing like particles of light photons have no rest mass.

And there are other particles that likewise have no rest mass some of them, however, are very massive. So that's one of the properties of quantum particles. Another is charge, they can have electric charge, like the electron has a negative electric charge.

The, the proton has a positive charge or the proton is composite it's made of particles that have charge and so on. So those are some of the properties of those ones we kind of have some familiarity with, because we, if you've ever played with magnets you know something about, you know, North attracts South and so on.

And that's a, that's an aspect of the electric electromagnetic field particles can also have a thing called spin. And one of the neat things about quantum is a lot of the terminology we use are very basic English words I really like that it's not like in biology where everything's Latin.

If you know English you can you can talk about quantum mechanics particles have spin which means yeah they they can rotate they can spin. And that should be obvious with things like molecules that think of a water molecule it's got the big oxygen there and the two hydrogens, I can hit that thing on the right side and it sure enough it'll spin, because it has size to it and so it can it can rotate.

But one of the things that's interesting about quantum quantum particles is that many properties of these particles are quantized. That's where we get the word quantum. And that basically means they come in certain discrete levels but nothing in between.

And that is caused by the wave nature of matter and I don't want to get into too many details of this but the reason that electrons, for example, can only orbit in certain shells around an atom and not in between, is because of their wave nature.

So, electron acts kind of like a wave, at times, with peaks and troughs, and the distances where it can orbit or distances where the circumference is an integer number of wavelengths so when the electron comes back so so the electron is like say a peak when it's here, when it comes back around it's a peak again.

That works. If you made the orbit different where the peak, when it comes around the next time would be a trough, it would cancel out, and so the electron could not exist. That's why orbits are quantized.

And a lot of properties of quantum particles are quantized including spin. So, it's true I can spin that water molecule I can give it a little more energy it'll spin a little bit more. But we'll find that it's quantized in that a particle of water molecule can spin at a rate of three, whatever, rotations per unit time or two or one or zero I can stop it, but it can't orbit at one half, it can't rotate it a half or three halves or anything like that.

Spin is quantized. And so it's quantized into these integer units. And it turns out that quantum particles, also have spin. And let's see if I have a little illustration of this. The. So here we have electrons for example these are supposed to be electrons, and a depiction of them, and they can they can rotate, and we talked about the direction of their rotation, using the right hand rule so if they're spinning.

If you take your right hand and curl your fingers in the way that the particle is spinning the direction of your thumb is, is the direction of the spin so spin up would be a particle like you see on the, on the left there and then the right is spin down and so on.

So, molecules can spin that way, elementary particles particles that are not made of anything smaller can spin. And this is weird. For four reasons. First of all, as far as we can tell, elementary particles have no size.

Every experiment that's tried to detect, you know, size to these particles I've depicted them as little spheres but technically their points. But, but of course I can't depict the point because it has no size.

How can something that has no size rotate. I mean a sphere yeah you can you push on this side and you pull on that side it rotates, because it has sides, a point doesn't have sides it's just a point. And so how can it rotate.

Well it really can't, it's best to think about these elementary particles as having something that is mathematically like rotation, they have a little bit of built in angular momentum. Despite the fact that they don't have any size.

So that's the, that's one weird aspect of these quantum particles and all elementary particles have spin associated with them, except the Higgs boson, it does not spin. The second weird thing is that with a molecule, I can speed up or slow down the spin by giving it energy or removing energy.

And now it's quantized I can, you know, increase it from two to three to four to five I can't go in between. But with elementary particles they are born spinning and you cannot change the amount of spin.

For example, a photon a particle of light has a spin of one, and you cannot change that, that you can't make it zero you can't make it to all photons have a spin of one they're born spinning as, so to speak, and there's nothing that can change that.

That's kind of weird. The amount of spin cannot be changed the direction can. If you have a photon that's that spin up because it's been in this way. There are conditions where I can rotate it make it spin down that that we can do, but the amount of the spin cannot be changed, it's apparently set by God, and is built into particles and it affects their behavior.

So, we can we can redirect the spin we can change a particle from spin up to spin down but we can affect the amount of spin. Third, the third word property of spin is the. When we talk about the direction of the spin.

It's quantized in that when we measure the spin state of a particle like an electron the two that you see there, it will either be spin up or spin down. You might think of it as, you know, what can it be this way, not when you measure it, whenever you measure it, it'll either be aligned with your detector spin up or anti aligned spin down.

What if I rotate the director at 40, you know the detector at a 45 degree angle, then it'll be spin up or spin down. That's just part of the weirdness of quantum mechanics. And then the fourth thing that's really strange is that many elementary particles are born with the spin, that is impossible for us to achieve in that it's a half integer electrons for example have a spin that is a half.

Now we can't get a molecule to go to a half molecule can be one or two or three or zero, we can't get it to be a half and yet many of the particles that God created are born spinning at a rate that is impossible because it's halfway in between two integers.

So particles in the quantum world can have a spin of a half or three halves or five halves, or they can have a spin that's an integer. And that's weird, basically, at least I think it's weird that's part of the weirdness of it.

And based on the way these particles spin whether it's an integer which is kind of what we'd expect or a half integer which seems impossible. That will affect the behavior of the particles, so much that that's the first division in terms of the family of these elementary particles elementary particles are divided into fermions or bosons.

A fermion is a particle that has a half integer spin one half three halves five halves, something that's exactly in between two integers. And as far as we know spins can't be anything less than that it can't be like a fourth or a third, but you can have half spins, but it's built into the particle.

So that would be fermions. And then bosons are particles that have an integer spin, like particles of light, photons, or bosons, and so because they have a spin of one. Electrons, which are fundamental elementary particles they have a spin of one half.

And that causes them to either obey or disobey a particular rule called the Pauli exclusion principle. Fermions obey it, bosons disobey it. The Pauli exclusion principle says that you can't have two identical particles in the same quantum state.

At the same time, what's a quantum state. The same place, same energy level same spin state. Okay, and so if I if I have an electron here and it's and it's it's spin up and I tried to put another electron in that same location same energy level that's also spin up.

Nature will not allow it. It can't be done. And that is why the lowest energy shell in an atom contains two electrons and no more, you know how atoms have these shells of electrons. You can only put two in that bottom shell, because one of them will be spin up the other will be spin down.

If I try to put a third in there it'll either be spin up or spin down and you'll have two that are both spin up or both spin down. That's forbidden by the Pauli exclusion principle. So that the Pauli exclusion principle, combined with the fact that electrons or fermions is why all chemistry is possible.

Because bosons do not obey that rule. You can put as many bosons in the same quantum state as you want. Photons, you can put as many photons in the same quantum state. That's what a laser is. A laser is multiple photons existing at kind of at the same place at the same time, the same energy level.

And, and you can do that with light, you can't do that with electrons. So, had God made the electron had he given it a spin of one. Instead of, instead of a spin of one half, then electrons would be bosons they would disobey the Pauli exclusion principle.

And you could put as many electrons into that low lowest energy level in that as you want, which means chemistry would be impossible, the periodic table would not exist, you can have, you can have multiple atoms but they all would act chemically like hydrogen, because all the electrons would drop into that lowest energy level.

So it's just weird this this just because the electron spins at a half rather than one or zero is part of what makes chemistry possible, which I think is kind of amazing. So it's just one of the things that God thought about when he's creating this universe.

So bosons do not obey that Pauli exclusion principle in fact they go out of their way to disobey, they're just rebels. But, so we're going to start with looking at the elementary fermions, and this will take the most time especially when I get to quarks.

So if we're still on quarks and you're like, oh my he's taking way too long. The bosons will go really fast. So we're going to take the most time with these because there's some introductory material here that needs to be explained.

Leptons, Neutrinos, and Antileptons

So the elementary fermions contain two families leptons and quarks, or if you will four because there's anti leptons and anti quarks. And we're gonna start with the leptons because they're easiest and you already know one, the electron.

The electron is the lightest charged lepton, the word lepton means light ones, not light like photons but light in the sense of not heavy, very low mass leptons are very low mass, except for the towel.

That's the one exception. And it wasn't discovered yet when they gave the name leptons all the existing known leptons were light at that time. The electron you can see on this table here it has a mass.

That is why I gave it I gave two different units for the mass I gave kilograms because that's something we're kind of familiar with your you might know your weight, you know person might weigh 80 kilograms, and it's tech that's your mass actually but.

And so the electron by comparison is 9 .1 times 10 to the negative 31st power kilograms, so it's very low mass. And because these particles. All these quantum particles are low mass compared to the stuff we deal with every day we tend to use different units we tend to use MEV, MEV is million electron volts.

That's actually unit of energy we divide by c squared to make it a unit of mass, and so electron is 0 .5 MEV that's pretty light for an elementary particle most particles are heavier than that. So you know about electrons they are elementary as far as we know, you may not, you may not have known the electron has a big brother called a muon.

A muon is identical in every way to an electron, except it's 200 times heavier. For whatever reason, it's just it's just heavier than an electron. And, but all the other properties of the same they all have a spin of one half all leptons do the three on the top row, all have a charge of negative one so so does the muon.

And the towel the towels and even bigger heavier version, and it weighs 1 .7 billion electron volts, which is quite heavy. Well it's heavy for a lepton that that's about twice the mass of a proton. So there you go.

The electron, on the other hand, is almost 2000 times less massive than a proton. That's why the electrons zip around the outside of the atom and the proton just wiggle slightly because it most of the masses in the center of the atom so electrons don't contribute very much to your mass.

It's primarily the protons and neutrons that do. There are neutral versions of each of these three particles that you see on the top and they're indicated on the bottom table you have, and they're called neutrinos neutrino means little neutral one.

There's, there's a neutrino version of electron electron neutrino there's a muon neutrino and there's a town neutrino. So they're just neutral versions of the charged leptons that you see in the top. And one other difference is they're extremely low mass, less than less than one electron volt.

Okay electron is point 5 million electron volts neutrinos are less than one electron volt for a long time physicists thought they were completely massless like photons. But we now know because of the math that they obey that they must have a small finite amount of mass but we don't know exactly what it is.

And so we just know that it's, we know that it's very small. The neat thing about neutrinos is they're kind of like the ghosts of particles because they can pass through ordinary matter. And in fact, right now, every second about a trillion neutrinos are passing right through your thumb.

They're produced in the core of the sun, one of the byproducts of fusion is neutrinos, they stream straight out through the bulk of the sun. And then stream out into space and some of them are intersecting your body right now they're completely harmless, but nonetheless there are trillions of neutrinos passing through your body, every second, doesn't matter if it's day or night, you might think well the earth would block them it doesn't because if it's nighttime, they come from the sun they go straight through the earth and then come up out of the earth and go through you and harmlessly out into space.

Pretty remarkable. Why do they do that. The answer is because atoms are mostly empty space. If I had the the nucleus of an atom, being kind of the head of a pin. The electron shell would be larger than this room.

So atoms are mostly empty space and so when that neutrinos zipping by it likely misses one of the two electrons because they have no size anyway and they're zipping around. And then unless it hits that nucleus, which is very unlikely it's just going to pass right through that atom right through the next atom and so on and so forth.

So of course, they pass through matter, because matters mostly empty space. In fact, statistically a neutrino can pass through about 20 trillion miles of solid lead before it is likely to actually impact either the nucleus or one of the electrons.

So it's it neutrinos just don't care about any other particles they just do their own thing they stream harmlessly through the universe. They're very difficult to detect for that reason. And the only way we can detect them is when they do occasionally hit hit either the nucleus of an atom or the electron in an atom so pretty neat and that make might make you wonder why doesn't everything do that, because why doesn't the electron.

I mean it's got no size as well why doesn't it slip through an atom and the answer is the electron is charged. It's got that negative charge. And so long before it gets to the atom it can already feel the negative charge of another electron there and they repel each other.

So the reason that electrons muons and towels don't pass through matters they're charged there. They are mutually repelled by the electrons in the end. Now if you haven't heard about muons or towels that's because they're not very common.

And that's because they disintegrate very quickly they decay. Many elementary particles are what we call unstable they will decay, which means they spontaneously change into some other combination of particles.

The muon for example will decay into an electron, and also an electron and a neutrino and a muon neutrino, so it produces other particles in the process. Generally, it's the heavier particles that do that heavier particles will decay into lighter particles, if they can.

We also need to know about anti leptons then so the leptons are at the top, these are the symbols that are used for them so the electron is a lowercase e with a little subscript or superscript of a minus sign.

And then, and then the neutrinos are indicated by the Greek letter new looks kind of like a V it's a new with a subscript indicating which species of neutrino the electron neutrino the muon and the towel.

And then you have anti particles you've heard of anti matter, that's just like matter but the charges are reversed. They're not as common but you can you can have anti electrons, and I use blue to indicate negative charge so red indicates positive charge an anti electron also called a positron.

It's identical to an electron except the charges flipped. So it's positively charged instead of negative. And likewise, you have an anti muon and you have an anti towel, and you have three anti neutrinos, and you might be wondering how are anti neutrinos different from neutrinos since they're both neutral.

And the answer is they might not be in some theories of physics neutrinos and anti neutrinos are identical in other models of physics, they are, they can be distinguished. Because one is sort of a mirror reflection of the other even though the charge is both zero.

So there's your anti anti left times. We're going to find that when particles decay or when you when you create new particles from energy, which we can do in particle accelerators. There are certain things that God allows to change and certain things God does not allow to change.

The particular flavor of left on can change flavors what we refer to as the different members of that family. So there's six flavors of left on six flavors of anti left times. God allows them to change the muon can be can decay into an electron.

But when that happens, there are certain things that God does not allow to change. For example, the total charge can't change the total energy can't change. There's another conserved property called left on number it can't change either the left times have a left each left on has a left on number of plus one anti left times have a left on number of negative one.

And what that means is if I take energy and create a new left on which we can do from energy. You have to also produce an anti left time because the total left on number has to be zero before and after.

And so there are these conservation rules I'm not going to go through all these, because they get a little bit meaty but I will point out that mass and energy is always conserved therefore particles can only decay into less massive particles.

So a muon can decay, and this is the way a muon decays. So on the left, that's the muon. And on the right is what it decays into you don't have to do anything in it and it decays quickly it's a fraction of a second.

It will that muon, they have a very limited life they last a fraction of a second and almost immediately decay into those three particles and electron and electron muon neutrino and electron anti neutrino.

And those, if you add the mass of those three particles, it's less than the mass of the muon, you might think, where did the extra mass go, it went into the energy of those neutrinos. So that's one of the rules is that massive particles can only decay into less massive particles, because that conserves mass energy, the total charge has to be conserved.

What's the charge before it's negative one, what's the charge afterward you add up the charge of the three particles is still negative one, because two of them are neutral. The total spin state has to be conserved muons have a spin of a half, let's say it's spin up so it'd be plus one half.

You add up the spins of the particles after you see one of the spin down so it's negative a half. So a half plus a half minus a half is a half. And so the total spin states conserved and the lepton numbers conserved, because the muon has a lepton number of one.

So does the electron and the muon neutrino but then the anti neutrino has a lepton number of negative one. My point in this all this bookkeeping, you can figure out which particles decay. And in many cases, how they would have to decay.

Just by following these conservation laws. So, because, because these particles obey math, we can predict how they decay in many instances. And so for example muons and taus muons and tau particles are unstable they they are massive and so they will decay into less massive particles but the electron.

The electron is the least massive charged particle, and therefore it cannot decay. Because you might say, well, maybe, could it decay into electron neutrino that's lighter. Yes, but it wouldn't conserve charge.

It's got to dump that negative charge and there's no way to do it because there are no less massive charged particles than electron therefore it, it has to be stable. And you can be grateful for that because you've got all kinds of electrons circling the atoms of your body which makes chemistry right and so it's very good that electrons don't decay.

You can make an atom with with muons instead of electrons, but that muon decays very quickly and one of the particles that decays into is an electron, so the neutrinos are stable, but they have the peculiar ability to oscillate they can switch from one flavor to another, back and forth only neutrinos do that as far as we know, and anti neutrinos.

And if you're wondering, how do, how do we know anything about these particles, especially things like muons and tells that last only a fraction of a second and they're gone. The answer is, they can collide particles, they can collide particles together in particle accelerators and from the energy of that collision.

These particles are produced muons tells, and they stream away from the collision site, and they enter what's called a cloud chamber. And it looks something like that they leave little trails. There's material in the cloud chamber and when, when these particles pass through the cloud chamber they leave a visible trail.

Now this is almost instantaneous but we can take a picture of it. And so we can we can study it later. And physicists will put a magnetic field over that cloud chamber. The, and when a charged particles in a magnetic field it will spiral.

And by measuring the size of the spiral, you can determine the mass and the charge of the particle that produced it. So it's pretty amazing that there's more to it than that but that's partly how physicists figure out these particles that have only a fleeting existence that lasts just a fraction of a second.

Quarks, Hadrons, and the Strong Force

So we've covered leptons and anti leptons. Now we're going to move on to quarks and anti quarks. Quarks are a little bit harder but on the one hand, they're very similar because they, they're also that just as there are six species of six flavors of leptons there are six flavors of quarks.

Three generations with two in each generation, there they are. So, but there are some differences and the first one that stands out is that quarks have fractional electric charge. Quarks and anti quarks are the only particles, as far as we know that have a fractional electric charge.

The, the up quark, which is the first one you see there in the upper left has a charge of plus two thirds. The down quark just below it has a charge of negative one third. So it's the same type of charges electron but only one third the amount, very strange and composite particles don't do that.

Composite particles always have an integer charge might be zero, but it's always an integer so they have fractional charge that's kind.