system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What are electrons, protons and neutrons actually made of, and does it differ from atom to atom?
gpt
A lot of answers, not many of them ELI5.

Which is unsurprising. This area of physics is pretty weird if you're not already into it.

In laymen's terms:

Imagine a proton or neutron not as a hard sphere, but more like a little bubble of soup.

In that soup you have the main ingredients and flavours that make up the bulk of the soup, these are called "quarks". 

But in the soup, you also have thickeners and water and so on that make the ingredients stick together, we call that stuff "gluons".

If you follow a certain recipe, combining the right quarks/ingredients, you make a soup called a proton. A different recipe and you might get a neutron.

Now it doesn't matter what atom you are in and it doesn't matter if the thickeners/gluons change, if you use the same ingredients, you get the same soup - whether it be proton soup or neutron soup.

Now there's another group of particles called "leptons" which include electrons. But to our knowledge, they're not made of anything else. They just exist as their own particles. If you want to torture the metaphor, call them the bread roll next to the soup.


But science is currently wondering if that's all there is - what if there's something that makes up the bread roll, or the potato in the soup. Is there something smaller? How can we find out?

These questions are, as yet, unanswered.