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The simple questions are the hardest ones to answer.

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What is a thing?

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Why do things happen?

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And why DO they happen the way they do?

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Let's try to approach this step by step.

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What are you made of?

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You are matter,

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which is made of molecules,

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which are made of atoms,

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and those are made of elementary particles.

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But, if elementary particles are the smallest things that exist,

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What are THEY made of?

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To answer a simple question, let's start simply.

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Let's wipe the universe clean.

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Away with matter, antimatter, radiation, particles, anything.

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Now let's take a closer look at absolutely nothing.

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What is empty space?

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Is it what we call a vacuum?

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There are no atoms, no matter, nothing!

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Is it really all that empty?

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Nothing gives us the building blocks for everything.

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In a sense, empty space is a lot like a vast, calm ocean.

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While the water is very still when nothing is happening,

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a stiff breeze can create some serious waves.

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Our universe works a lot like this.

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There are these oceans everywhere.

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Physicists call them fields.

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This might be strange and new,

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but think about radiation for example.

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By exciting what's known as the electromagnetic field, a little kink is created

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which is the particle we call the photon.

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The particle that carries radiation, we perceive it as light.

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This isn't unique to light; every particle in the universe is made this way.

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There are fields for every particle of matter all with their own rules.

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For example, along with the electromagnetic field, there is an electron field everywhere in the universe

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and little kinks in that field are electrons.

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All together, the fields of our universe can produce 17 particles which can be divided into 3 categories.

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The leptons, and the quarks, and the bosons.

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Leptons consist of the electron as well as its cousins: muon and tau particles.

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Each has an associated neutrino.

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Then, there are quarks.

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The quarks are the nuclear family of particles.

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They're always found bound together in groups and pairs

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and make up protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms.

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Together, the leptons and quarks are the matter particles.

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They make up all the things you see.

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The air you breathe, the sun that warms you,

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the computer you're using right now to distract yourself from the stuff you should be doing.

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But things don't just exist, they also do stuff.

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In some philosophical sense, the properties of a thing are just as much a part of it as existence itself.

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This is where the bosons and the fields that makes them come in to play.

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While the quarks and leptons are made by the matter fields,

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the bosons are made by force fields.

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We call a rule of the universe a force.

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And so far, 4 fundamental forces have been discovered:

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Electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces.

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These forces are the rule book of a game where the pieces are the particles, and the game is the universe.

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They tell particles what they can do and how they can do it.

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Bishops move diagonally,

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massless particles move at the speed of light,

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knights can jump,

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gravity attracts.

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The forces are the rules for how particles interact

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Which ultimately make them the rules for how particles assemble into all the big things we see in the universe.

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Gravity isn't just the rule for orbits around the sun or apples falling from trees.

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As a rule, it says matter attracts, which builds planets and stars.

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Electromagnetism isn't just the rule for magnets attracting or repelling, or electric currents in light bulbs.

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It governs all atomic bonds, building every molecule.

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Together, forces and particles are sort of like the Tinkertoys of existence.

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The bosons are like messengers. Passed between, you could say, connecting the matter particles.

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Which they use to tell each other how to move.

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Each particle uses a certain set of the forces to interact with other particles.

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Quarks, for example, can interact with each other with electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force,

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but electrons don't use the strong force, just electromagnetism.

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The quarks exchange strong force bosons, communicating the strong nuclear attraction to each other,

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while the protons they build exchange the particles of electromagnetism, photons with the electrons.

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Thus, the quarks end up locked up in nuclei,

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while the electrons remain attached by their electric attraction, building atoms.

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Even though the universe has lots of big, messy phenomena like life, supernova, and computers,

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that seem complex on the surface.

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If you zoom in far enough on anything, you just get 17 particles emerging from underlying fields,

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playing a game with 4 rules.

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To summarize, in the most basic form we know right now, this is what things are.

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This theory is what physicists call the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

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You are basically nothing more than disturbances

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on an ocean that's excited by energy and guided by forces that make up the rules of the universe.

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But why? And what is a force?

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We'll have to explore a few more simple questions to get to the bottom of this.

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We made some wallpapers from some of the graphics in this video: You can get them on patreon.com

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If you want to help us make more videos, you can do so there.

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We really appreciate your support.

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While you decide, here are some more videos we made.