A public-education desk for the quantum field theory of elementary particles and three of the four forces — electromagnetic, weak, and strong. Gravity is not in the model. Tap a tile for a particle card; toggle matter vs force carriers; walk the three generations. Pair with stars (fusion is nuclear, not “elementary”), atmosphere (the air is atoms, not free quarks), and maths if you want the calculus under field theory later.
Educational schematic. Masses are rounded Particle Data Group / CERN classroom ranges — not a collider analysis, not a Lagrangian, and not a claim of new particles. Antiparticles exist for the charged (and most neutral) species; they are omitted from the grid so the lesson stays readable on a phone.
What it is
A field theory of stuff and three forces
CERN’s teaching line: everything we have actually seen in the lab is made from a few kinds of fundamental particle, interacting through forces carried by other particles. Developed into its modern form in the 1970s, the Standard Model organizes six quarks, six leptons, the gauge bosons of electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force, and — after 2012 — the Higgs boson associated with a field that gives many particles mass.
It is a quantum field theory: particles are excitations of fields, not billiard balls. At everyday energies you meet bound states (protons, atoms, light) rather than free top quarks. Gravity, described by general relativity at human and planetary scales, has not been fitted into this framework. On the size of an atom, gravity is negligible next to the other three — which is why the model still works at colliders even while it leaves the sky’s dominant force out.
Interactive · Particle grid
Tap a tile · columns are generations I–III, then force carriers
Gen IGen IIGen IIIBosons
QuarksLeptonsGauge bosonsHiggs
Interactive · Forces
Tap a force to recolor the grid: who carries it, and which particles feel it. Gravity is shown as a dashed outsider — familiar, not in the model.
Three generations
Same charges, heavier copies
Matter fermions come in three generations with the same electric charges. Generation I (up, down, electron, electron neutrino) is ordinary matter: protons are uud, neutrons udd, atoms bind electrons. Generation II (charm, strange, muon, muon neutrino) and III (top, bottom, tau, tau neutrino) are heavier, unstable copies. Muons and taus decay; heavy quarks hadronize or decay before you can put them in a bottle.
Why three, and not two or seventeen, is not answered by the model. A fourth generation of ordinary quarks and leptons is strongly disfavored by precision measurements (including the Z boson’s decay width). Heavier generations are not “better matter” — they are a repeating pattern whose reason is still open.
What’s missing
Open question
Gravity
Not in the Standard Model
Literacy · words that keep getting mixed
Elementary vs composite
Quarks and leptons are treated as pointlike. Protons and neutrons are not: they are baryons, three-quark bound states. Most of a proton’s mass is QCD binding energy, not the current-quark masses on the tile.
Color charge
A strong-force charge with three labels (red, green, blue — a metaphor, not visible color). Gluons carry color too. Leptons and the photon do not, so they ignore the strong force.
Confinement
Isolated quarks are not seen in ordinary conditions. They lock into color-neutral hadrons (baryons, mesons). A quark–gluon plasma at extreme temperature is a many-body state, not a jar of free quarks.
Gauge boson
A spin-1 force carrier: photon, W±, Z, gluons. The Higgs is a spin-0 scalar, not a gauge boson — it is listed with the bosons because it is not matter.
Higgs field
A field filling space. Particles that couple to it acquire mass; the photon does not, and stays massless. The Higgs boson is a quantum of that field, observed at the LHC in 2012 (ATLAS and CMS).
Neutrino oscillation
A neutrino produced as one flavor can be detected as another. That requires mass differences. The original Standard Model wrote neutrinos as massless; oscillations (Super-Kamiokande, SNO, and successors; Nobel Prize 2015) are a known extension, not a rumor.
Sources · public CERN / Fermilab / PDG
Cited, not invented
CERN — The Standard Model — matter particles, three included forces, gravity left out, graviton not observed.
CERN — Higgs boson — 4 July 2012 observation by ATLAS and CMS at the LHC; field that gives mass to W, Z, and matter particles that couple to it.
Particle Data Group — review and listings used for rounded masses and charges on this page (u ~2.2 MeV, d ~4.7 MeV, s ~93 MeV, c ~1.27 GeV, b ~4.18 GeV, t ~173 GeV; e 0.511 MeV; μ 105.7 MeV; τ 1.777 GeV; W ~80.4 GeV; Z ~91.2 GeV; H ~125 GeV).
Nobel Prize in Physics 2015 — Kajita and McDonald / Super-Kamiokande and SNO: neutrino oscillations, hence nonzero neutrino mass.
NASA Science — Dark matter and dark energy — cosmological inventory the Standard Model does not supply candidates for. Neutrinos exist and have mass, but they are too light and too fast to be the cold dark matter inferred from galaxies and the CMB.
No invented discoveries, no fake papers. Masses drift slightly between PDG editions; trust the live listings over a static tile. Figures are teaching toys.
Educational schematic from public CERN, Fermilab, PDG, NASA, and Nobel materials. Not a quantum field theory course, not a claim that the model is finished, and not a catalog of unconfirmed particles. Cross-read the outbound links when a number matters.