Question: Why is everything made of particles?

Dominika Vasilkova answered on 6 Apr 2026:

Well, because that’s what we decided to call the ‘stuff’ that everything is made of! This is why you could have a ‘sand particle’ or a ‘point particle’ as well as the particles in particle physics, which are explicitly the smallest bits of real stuff we know about.

An interesting question linked to this is why particles and not so-called ‘anti-particles’ – each real fundamental particle has a twin which is almost the same, but slightly different in how they behave. When a particle and antiparticle meet, they destroy each other and leave only energy – and in the early Universe, for some reason, we had slightly more particles than antiparticles. Why? We think it’s linked to something called “CP violation”, which is a fancy way of saying ‘these things don’t behave in a symmetric way’, but there’s not enough of that mismatch to explain why we are here. So it’s a mystery we are trying to solve!