(March 6, 2014 at 4:02 pm)BrokenQuill92 Wrote: Checked there too but maybe science hasn't caught up to my questions yet. I understand what quarks ARE I want know what the heck they're composed of, and why they can't seem to be isolated.
They are point particles, so they are not thought to be composed of anything. Alex K has described why you can't isolate them.
With science you make a model, then test this model to see if it is a good representation of reality. It is still a representation. People think of particles like billiard balls because they understand a newtonian billiard ball, but this is in some aspects a poor model.
This is just like the question "is an electron a particle or a wave?". Well actually it is neither, that is just how we have modelled it in order to understand it. I don't think it is really possible to imagine what these things are actually like, as you are limited by what your brain can currently understand, just as you cannot visualise 4 space dimensions. You can get around this by understanding the mathematics, but this requires years of study. For example particles have a property called spin. However this does not mean that the particle is spinning in the way you'd visualise the Earth spinning (it is a point particle).
So all we know is that there is stuff out there, and it approximately follows laws that we have managed to determine.
