Smallest particle? Quarks or Atom? Explain your answer?

Question

pls help.. im confused

Answer 1

A quark is much smaller than an atom.

An atom is composed of electrons, neutrons and protons.  Neutrons and protons are made up of different types of quarks.  

The atom is considered the smallest particle at some levels of science for simplicity and because for most practical purposes (chemistry for example) it is as small as you really need to examine (well electrons really dictate chemical reactions, but besides that).

In the scheme of things though, quantum mechanics (a branch of physics) deals with things like quarks and their interactions inside the nucleus of an atom.

Answer 2

An atom is far larger than a quark, which is a subatomic particle. Atoms are usually composed of three elements: protons, neutrons and electrons. Protons and neutrons in turn are made up of quarks.

Answer 3

Quarks are by far the smallest, being components of subatomic particles such as protons and neutrons. See the following slightly edited extract from Wikipedia:

A quark is a physical particle that interacts via the strong force and that forms one of the two basic constituents of matter, the other being the lepton. Two kinds of quarks combine in specific ways to form protons and neutrons, in each case taking exactly three quarks to make the composite particle in question.

There are six different types of quark, usually known as flavors: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. The names do not indicate anything about their properties, but were chosen arbitrarily based on the need to name them something that could be easily remembered and used. The charm, strange, top, and bottom varieties are highly unstable, and are believed to have decayed within a fraction of a second after the Big Bang – though they can be briefly recreated in high energy interactions. The "up" and "down" varieties are abundant and are distinguished by their electric charge amongst other things. It is this which makes the difference when quarks clump together to form protons or neutrons: a proton is made up of two "up quarks" and one "down quark", yielding a net charge of +1, while a neutron contains one "up quark" and two "down quarks", yielding a net charge of 0.

In nature, quarks are always found bound together in groups and never in isolation, because of a phenomenon known as confinement. These groups of quarks are called hadrons, with groups of two quarks known specifically as mesons and groups of three quarks as baryons. Various combinations of the six flavors account for all of the 200 or more known mesons and baryons.

Quarks are the only fundamental particles that interact through all four of the fundamental forces.

The name "quark" was first used by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann,  who attributed it to the sentence “Three quarks for Muster Mark” in James Joyce's famous and somewhat impenetrable "Finnegans Wake".