Protons and neutrons are made of quarks from "summary" of The Quantum Universe by Brian Cox,Jeff Forshaw
The world of particle physics is a strange one, where the familiar rules of everyday life no longer apply. At this microscopic level, matter is not made up of solid, indivisible particles as we might have once thought. Instead, scientists have discovered that protons and neutrons, the building blocks of atomic nuclei, are in fact composed of even smaller particles known as quarks. Quarks are the fundamental constituents of matter, but they have never been observed in isolation. They are always bound together in groups of two or three, forming particles such as protons and neutrons. These combinations of quarks are held together by the strong nuclear force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature. This force is mediated by particles called gluons, which act as the "glue" that binds quarks together. Each proton is made up of two "up" quarks and one "down" quark, while each neutron consists of one "up" quark and two "down" quarks. The properties of these quarks determine the characteristics of the particles they form, such as their mass, charge, and spin. By studying the be...
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