Quarks and electrons may not fully describe us
The Simplest Answer Is Often a Trap
The most straightforward description of what makes up a human body is almost always the wrong one. A physiologist would say we are 60 percent water, roughly 20 percent carbon, with a scattering of other elements — meaning mostly hydrogen and oxygen. That answer is technically correct, but it only scratches the surface of the atom. A physicist digs deeper, past the atomic level entirely.
Hydrogen, the simplest atom, contains a single proton in its nucleus with one electron orbiting it. Hydrogen can also carry one or more neutrons. Oxygen, by contrast, has eight protons in its nucleus, up to eight electrons, and as many as 20 neutrons. Every atomic element is some combination of these subatomic building blocks. So a particle physicist might naturally answer: humans are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons.
But one of these particles is fundamentally different from the others. Electrons are fundamental, indivisible particles that cannot be broken into anything smaller. Protons and neutrons, on the other hand, are composite objects. A proton is made of two up quarks and one down quark. A neutron is the reverse: two down quarks and one up quark. A quark, like an electron, cannot be broken down into anything smaller.
Physicist Dan Hooper, author of. The Edge of Space-Time, has long told audiences that humans are collections of quarks and electrons. Yet as Hooper prepared for his talk at New Scientist Live in October 2026, he began to question whether this rendering is truly fair. There might be another particle that belongs on that ingredient list.
The Counterargument That Has Not Yet Been Refuted
Quarks never exist alone. They are always bound together with other quarks, and the most stable combinations are the three-quark groups we call protons and neutrons. Many other combinations exist — two-quark pairs and five-quark pentaquarks — but all of them are unstable and short-lived. You will never see a lone quark, and that is because of how the strong nuclear force works.
The strong force holds quarks in place so powerfully that attempting to pull a quark out of a proton generates enough energy to create another quark and an anti-quark. An anti-quark is effectively antimatter: same mass, opposite electric charge. In the end, the original quark remains bound to something, never escaping at all. That binding happens through another particle: gluons.
Gluons are particles that glue quarks together — their name is literal. The strong force exists because quarks interact via gluons, so including gluons in the ingredient list seems logical. But there is a catch: gluons are not real in the ordinary sense. They play a meaningful physical role in holding matter together, yet they have no meaningful physical existence.
Physicists call gluons “virtual” particles because they are so incredibly short-lived that it is like they do not exist at all. Virtual photons also appear inside atoms as part of electromagnetic interactions. Hooper is not ready to claim that people are made of particles of light, and he leaves gluons out when he explains that humans are collections of electrons and quarks.
What This Means for Our Understanding of Matter
The strangeness of gluons reveals a deeper problem with how we talk about what happens inside an atom. The word “particle” conjures an image of a tiny billiard ball. That visual metaphor fails completely when trying to imagine something that is barely there. Gluons are so fleeting that their existence is almost theoretical.
This challenge is not unique to physics. Every field that studies the very small or the very brief must confront the gap between language and reality. The idea of a solid, stable particle does not serve us well when the object in question exists for such a short time that it barely registers as real. Yet gluons are essential to the structure of every proton and neutron in every atom in every human body.
Hooper will speak at New Scientist Live in October 2026, and he will likely stick to saying that humans are phenomenal collections of quarks and electrons. But he admits that he may change his mind about the importance of including the elusive yet powerful gluon.
The broader lesson is that the simplest description of matter is often incomplete. What we call a particle may be a temporary arrangement of forces and energy, not a solid object. The ingredients of a human body are not settled facts — they are an ongoing question that physicists continue to refine.