round the turn of the 4th century BC, the Greek philosopher Democritus caught the smell of baking and thought that little bits of bread must be floating through the air and into his nose. He called the little bits “atoms” (meaning “uncuttable”) and imagined them as tiny spherical balls.

Source: File:AetherWind.svg - https://en.wikipedia.org

: Assumed to exist for much of the 19th century, the theory held that a “medium” of aether pervaded the universe through which light could propagate. The celebrated Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 was the first to provide hard evidence that aether did NOT exist, and the theory lost all popularity among scientists by the 1920s.

Atoms: Composites of Composites

Atoms are the first generation of fundamental particles. 

Scientists were convinced there were only three fundamental particles in nature: protons and neutrons, which make up the nucleus of an atom, and electrons that orbits around it. But atoms are not little solid spheres. They are made of even smaller bits, called particles. Scientists’ description of those particles and the forces that govern their behavior is called the "Standard Model of particle physics"

The Standard Model was not created by just one person, or just one collaboration, at one time. It is a combination of Albert Einstein’s 1905 and 1915 theories of relativity, and Max Planck’s 1900 theory of quantum mechanics, as well as the 1954 Yang-Mills field equations. It also includes the 1969 theory of the charm quark that led to the November Revolution in 1974 when experimentalists found charm quarks. Experimental findings that confirm the Standard Model span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the bottom quark in 1977, tau lepton and neutrino in 1978, top quark in 1995 and Higgs boson in 2012.

Physicists know that Standard Model accurately predicts the behavior of particles from about 100 GeV to 1 TeV.

But if the Standard Model is so long-lived and well proven, why are physicists so eager to find “new physics” beyond the Standard Model?

Part of the reason is that the Standard Model doesn’t explain everything (it doesn’t account for gravity, for instance). But another part of the reason is that it’s possible for the Standard Model to be expanded without invalidating previous data or previous theories. As high-energy particle accelerators generate particles at higher and higher energies, it’s entirely possible to see a particle exist at 750 GeV that would not have been detectable in any of the previous lower-energy experiments. In fairness, we at least have some kind of starting point. So, we should really call it "the Starting model of particle physics". Moving on, it turned out the protons and neutrons had even smaller particles inside them.

Source: File:Standard Model of Elementary Particles.svg - https://en.wikipedia.org

Forces of nature

Particles communicate with one another via four forces:electromagnetism, the strong force, the weak force and gravity. (Differentparticles communicate through different forces)

Bosons, such as the photon, transmit forces.

"Electromagnetic phenomena are defined in terms of the electromagnetic force, sometimes called the Lorentz force, which includes both electricity and magnetism as different manifestations of the same phenomenon."Source: Electromagnetism - https://en.wikipedia.org

Source: File:Nuclear Force anim smaller.gif - https://en.wikipedia.org

Fermions, such as the electron, make up what we refer to as matter. Antimatter is like matter except it has the opposite charge. For example, the electron has a counterpart that’s exactly the same mass, except with positive charge instead of negative. When a particle of matter meets its antimatter twin, they both annihilate in a burst of pure energy. Antimatter is incredibly rare in the Universe.

Dark Matter: For observing the Universe, it looks like a huge portion of it is made of Dark Matter – a new kind of thing that doesn’t interact with regular matter and so it is missing from the Standard Model of particle physics. Fermions are divided into two kinds of particles, depending on the forces they experience. there are six leptons, the best known of which is the electron, a tiny fundamental particle with a negative charge.

"The ΛCDM (Lambda cold dark matter) or Lambda-CDM model is a parametrization of the Big Bang cosmological model in which the universe contains a cosmological constant, denoted by Lambda (Greek Λ), associated with dark energy, and cold dark matter (abbreviated CDM). It is frequently referred to as the standard model of Big Bang cosmology because it is the simplest model that provides a reasonably good account of the following properties of the cosmos:"

Source: Lambda-CDM model - https://en.wikipedia.org

These are the quarks and the leptons and the Neutrinos

There are 6 variants of these quarks and 6 of the Leptons. Then there is the Neutrino.

The neutrino is so tiny compared to all the other particles that it really begs an explanation. It’s possible that the neutrino doesn’t get its mass from the Higgs in the same way other particles do. They are fast but interact only through the weak force. They can easily zip straight through a planet. They are created in nuclear reactions, such as those powering the Sun’s core or an atomic explosion. These are perhaps the least understood of all the particles in the Standard Model.

Source: File:FirstNeutrinoEventAnnotated.jpg - https://en.wikipedia.org

Other “off the chart” things

Supersymmetry is one mystery where every particle has another twin with higher mass.

Some of these particles would interact very weakly with ordinary matter and so could be good candidates for Dark Matter. Again, this is uncharted waters as far as the "Standard Model of particle physics" is concerned.

Quantum ‘spin’ defines a lot about a particle. If a particle has spin-½, it’s a particle of matter, such as an electron, proton or neutron. If a particle has spin-1, it’s a force carrier – such as photons that transmit the electromagnetic force and gluons that transmit the strong force. 

Gravity - Absent in the model?

The Higgs boson is unique, being the only known particle with spin-0. In this sense it’s neither matter nor force. it’s the field existing everywhere in space. And when particles move through space, they tend to bump into this field, and this interaction slows them down (similar to how it’s more difficult to move through water than air). This interaction is what gives fundamental particles their mass as they bump up against it – without the Higgs, they’d be massless. Some particles such as photons and gluons don’t interact with the Higgs field, so are massless.

Is the Madala boson to dark matter what the Higgs is to 'normal' matter? A team of physicists thinks so. The group of scientists looked at older CERN datasets and proposed there is a new boson. The "Madala" boson would have similar properties. But whereas the Higgs may only interact with regular matter, the "Madala" boson would also interact with dark matter.

"Although it is hypothesised that the Higgs field permeates the entire Universe, evidence for its existence has been very difficult to obtain. In principle, the Higgs field can be detected through its excitations, manifested as Higgs particles, but these are extremely difficult to produce and detect. The importance of this fundamental question led to a 40 year search, and the construction of one of the world's most expensive and complex experimental facilities to date, CERN's Large Hadron Collider, in an attempt to create Higgs bosons and other particles for observation and study. On 4 July 2012, the discovery of a new particle with a mass between 125 and 7002127000000000000♠127 GeV/c2 was announced; physicists suspected that it was the Higgs boson. Since then, the particle has been shown to behave, interact, and decay in many of the ways predicted by the Standard Model. It was also tentatively confirmed to have even parity and zero spin, two fundamental attributes of a Higgs boson. This appears to be the first elementary scalar particle discovered in nature. More studies are needed to verify that the discovered particle has properties matching those predicted for the Higgs boson by the Standard Model, or whether, as predicted by some theories, multiple Higgs bosons exist."

Source: Higgs boson - https://en.wikipedia.org

The latter was discovered using the same dataset which unearthed the Higgs Boson, earning theorists who first proposed it, the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics!

Again, all new stuff from theorists with no foundation on a "Standard Model of particle physics", or just no foundation, period. Amazingly unscientific.