At the core of everything we’ve ever touched, seen, or interacted with here on Earth is the same humble physical structure: the atom. Each human body possesses around 10²⁸ of them, and they come in just under 100 different species, or elements, through natural processes, and we’ve synthesized several dozen more in laboratory experiments. Combined, atoms bind together to make unfathomably intricate, complex structures on both microscopic and macroscopic scales, and compose every living and nonliving object presently known to humanity. But atoms weren’t always around; they only formed in the aftermath of the hot, early stage of our Universe known as the hot Big Bang. How did they arise, and what made their existence possible? That’s the question of Dave Drews, who wants to know: “Out [of] the primordial soup after the Big Bang, how did atoms come to be? How did protons and neutrons come to be to make atoms? Were there free-floating quarks combining in the right combinations to form protons and neutrons? How did quarks come to be? Were there free-floating …

At the start of the 20th century, we were still figuring out what the structure of matter was. We knew everything was made up of atoms, and that there were negatively charged electrons within them, but the rest of the atom was a mystery. Over the course of the past 125 years, we subsequently learned that there was a small, massive, positively charged nucleus anchoring every atom. That nucleus itself is composed of nucleons — protons and neutrons — with each one itself made up of quarks and gluons. Protons consist of two up and one down quark apiece, while neutrons are made of two down and one up quark. But there are four other fundamental types of quark: strange, charm, bottom, and top, with the latter three all heavier than the proton itself. How would it be possible, then, for such a particle, one more massive than the proton, to be found inside of a proton? That’s what our Patreon supporter Aaron Weiss wants to know, asking: “[H]ow can there be charm quarks in …