If you haven’t memorized the Standard Model, you might be wondering a) what’s going on, and b) where the ninjas are. So, I’ll explain to anyone who as a little time.
This is a cartoonized version of the Standard Model. So, the round humanoids are elementary particles. Their graphics are based on their name and/or characteristics. The categories are as follows: green = quarks, blue = leptons (those two make up matter), and red = bosons (they carry forces).
First, quarks. Top left: up quark, it’s pointing up. Bottom left: down quark, it’s pointing down. Top middle: charm quark, it’s kissing at you. Bottom middle: strange quark, mixing elixirs, has a large eye, tilted mouth, and a pair of horns. Top right: top quark, on top of the platform; bottom quark: below the platform.
Next, leptons. The top row is the neutrinos, whose only graphically renderable characteristic is that they’re tiny (in comparison to other elementary particles), so, I made them small. In the bottom row, there’s the electron, the muon, and the tau. The only differences are that they’re (somewhat) big, bigger, and biggest. Therefore, I increased the size with each one.
Finally, there are the bosons. The top one is the photon (carrier of electromagnetic force, a.k.a. light) so it’s sparkly; the second and third from the top are the W and Z particles, respectively. They carry weak force (it comes into play in atomic nuclei) so I made the W trying to lift a light weight, and the Z particle has already given up. The bottom one, however, is the gluon, carrier of strong force (again, it comes into play in atomic nuclei) so it can easily lift heavy weights.
But wait, there’s more! You see the black and gray particles at the bottom? They aren’t actually particles. They gray one represents antimatter. Every particle has an antiparticle, which has the same mass and spin but opposite charge. Antimatter reacts violently with matter.
The black one represents all of the theories. Dark matter, dark energy, the graviton, string theory, etc. The things that haven’t been proven; that have eluded scientists. A little like… come on, the black clothes, the sword, you can guess it, right? It’s a… ninja! There’s that elusive ninja!
