If you fire electrons at protons hard enough, the electrons scatter as if the proton has parts. (For more details, see the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics.)
You can do it yourself, if you can produce a lightning bolt’s worth of voltage, but in a way sufficiently sustained and controlled that you don’t lose the electrons on their way to the protons. In practice, this has required nation-sized science budgets and facilities the size of a small airport…
Quarks just aren’t something that shows up until you’re in a serious era of Big Science subatomic experiment. As late as 1950, one could think that proton, neutron, electron and neutrino are all fundamental and account for all matter (the muon had already been detected, but they thought it was something else).
It was only when “strange” particles began to appear as tracks produced by cosmic rays, that there was serious evidence of something more, and for some time, it looked like strangeness might be just another basic property (quantum number), like spin or charge. It took the scattering experiments to show that protons actually have parts.
If you fire electrons at protons hard enough, the electrons scatter as if the proton has parts. (For more details, see the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics.)
Is this an experiment you can perform yourself, or are you just guessing the teacher’s answer?
You can do it yourself, if you can produce a lightning bolt’s worth of voltage, but in a way sufficiently sustained and controlled that you don’t lose the electrons on their way to the protons. In practice, this has required nation-sized science budgets and facilities the size of a small airport…
Quarks just aren’t something that shows up until you’re in a serious era of Big Science subatomic experiment. As late as 1950, one could think that proton, neutron, electron and neutrino are all fundamental and account for all matter (the muon had already been detected, but they thought it was something else).
It was only when “strange” particles began to appear as tracks produced by cosmic rays, that there was serious evidence of something more, and for some time, it looked like strangeness might be just another basic property (quantum number), like spin or charge. It took the scattering experiments to show that protons actually have parts.