When we took science in high school, the first thing we learned were the basic particles: proton, neutron, and electron. One positive, one neutral, one negative. Our science teachers sounded so smart. It was all so simple!

Not so much. For instance, electrons are not the only negative particles. There are also muons, which have a larger mass. And then there are tau leptons (discovered by Martin Lewis Perl, Jew), which are even heavier.

And that's just scratching the surface. There are quarks of various varieties (including our favorite, the fantastically named strange antiquark). There are bosons. There are baryons (of which proton and neutron are just two). There are mesons. There are antiparticles: positron (electron with a positive charge), antimuon, antitau. There are even ghosts, which are not the ghosts think of, but these ones are all too real.

What's our point? It's not simple at all. Our high school science teachers didn't know shit.

(And, to be honest, we don't know shit either.)