Mystery #3Tier 3particle physics

If you kept zooming in past the atom, what would you finally find?

Take anything at all, a pebble, a puddle, your own thumb, and imagine a magic magnifying glass. Zoom in and you reach atoms, the tiny building blocks you may have heard of. But what if you did not stop there and kept on zooming, deeper and deeper? What would you finally find at the very bottom?

The vast ATLAS detector at CERN, a cathedral of steel and cabling built to catch the smallest pieces of matter there are, with a single worker tiny beside it — Photo: Simon Waldherr · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Your guess

What do you think you would find if you could zoom in far past the atom?

There's no single magic word to type, have a go in your own words, then reveal the answer to see how close you got.

Make a guess to unlock the hints and the answer.