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When most of us message someone, we just type in what we want to say and press “send”, but have you ever wondered how the text reaches your friend? The Standard Model can explain that, along with many other things. The first part of the Standard Model includes the building blocks of atoms, or fermions.

Fermions include protons, neutrons, and electrons, which if you didn’t know, are the three parts of an atom. Color change is an important property of fermions, creating limits to how wild a particle can be, as well as causing only colored particles to be affected by the strong force, a force that attracts protons and neutrons. Quarks are the building blocks of protons and neutrons, the nucleus. They are colored, attracting them towards each other. The other part of the Standard Model are the leptons. The leptons include the electron, which has no color allowing it to be free from the nucleus.

Along with the fermions, there are the bosons, another part of the Standard Model. The bosons govern three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong force, the weak force, and the electromagnetic force (the fourth fundamental force is gravity).

Bosons carry the three of the four fundamental forces mentioned above. The photon carries the electromagnetic force, which keeps the structure of the atom fixed by attracting opposite particles and repelling the identical particles. The gluon carries the strong force, which attracts the neutron and proton towards each other. The W and Z bosons carry the weak force, which runs beta decay, which powers nuclear fusion that runs the sun. The Higgs boson is another boson that is often associated with the Higgs field. The Higgs field is a field that gives fundamental particles mass, but only if you interact with it. Without mass, you travel at the speed of light, so as a particle moves through the Higgs field, its speed slows down, giving it mass. Without a Higgs field, protons would decay into neutrons, destroying atoms.

So back to our question of how you message someone. When you send a text message, information travels to a cell tower in the form of electromagnetic waves, or photons, which travels to your desired destination. Another way your phone relates to the Standard Model is that your phone is made up of fermions, and these fermions are held together by bosons. The strong force makes sure that the protons and neutrons attract and the nucleus doesn’t attract electrons, while the electromagnetic force keeps order in the nucleus.

The Unified Field Theory, also known as the theory of everything, is one that attempts to explain everything in the universe as branches of one single equation. Scientists have been unsuccessful at creating the Unified Field Theory, but the Standard Model is the closest scientists have been to completing the Unified Field Theory. Scientists even think that if we add the theorized graviton (which governs gravity) to the bosons, we may actually complete the Unified Field Theory.