Thanks, I'm out of my league here and know it
I tried simple language to explain my imagination, I tried to stay with what is accepted as far as I know which is probably less then grade school.
Oh? Well there are tons of interesting things to learn about in particle physics nowadays. I'll strum up a few things I can think of that might be useful:
- There are two broad classes of particles, fermions and bosons. Fermions are particles with fractional spin (spin values such as 1/2, 3/2, etc.) and bosons are particles with integral spin (spin values such as 0, 1, 2, etc.). Examples of fermions are elections, quarks (as well as the protons and neutrons they make up) and neutrinos. Examples of bosons are photons, gluons (which mediate the strong nuclear force), the Higgs boson and the hypothetical graviton. The consequences of this are profound, as two fermions cannot occupy the same quantum mechanical state at the same time whereas any number of bosons can. This means that you can only have a finite number of fermions in a given volume of space. I remember the difference by saying that "fermions" are "firm".
This is ultimately what prevents white dwarf stars from collapsing, as the electrons within them are compressed so much that the quantum mechanical rules keeping fermions from being at the same place at the same time (known as the Pauli exclusion principle) supply a degeneracy pressure to counteract the force of gravity. If gravity is too extreme, the star will collapse anyway, fusing electrons and protons together into neutrons and neutrinos. These neutrons, which are also fermions, now supply their own degeneracy pressure to hold them up against further collapse. The resulting star, now only about 10-15 miles across is called a neutron star for this reason. Increase the mass enough and even neutron degeneracy pressure cannot support it, causing it to collapse into a black hole (which, outside of the whole singularity thing, has an unknown internal structure).
- The strong nuclear force take two forms: that which binds quarks into nucleons (the proton and neutron) and that which binds protons and neutrons to each other to form atomic nuclei. The quark-binding strong nuclear force is mediated by bosons called gluons, which always bind quarks together to get a total color charge of "white" (it's not literally white: the word "color charge" is used in a similar sense for the quark-binding nuclear force as "electric charge" is used for the electromagnetic force. Quarks can be red, blue or green individually, and these three colors add up to white. Only states of white charge are known to exist, which is why individual quarks cannot be isolated. Antiquarks are yellow, cyan and magenta, which are opposites to red, blue and green. This means that one quark and one antiquark can bind together to get a total color charge of white. These are called meson particles). Theoretically, any sum of color charges that results in white can exist, such as three quarks, a quark-antiquark pair, or three quarks plus a quark-antiquark pair (these are known as pentaquarks, which are unstable and decay quickly).
The nucleon-binding strong nuclear force is carried by meson particles. Since mesons are composed partly of matter and partly of antimatter, they are unstable and decay quickly. Therefore, the field of force that they carry is very short-ranged, only holding particles together when they move very close to each other. Under most circumstances, this form of the strong nuclear force is strongly attractive (about 1,000 times stronger than electromagnetism), but if two particles are moved very, very close to each other, it becomes repulsive instead. This form of the strong nuclear force is measured by "hypercharge", which is +1 for neutrons and protons and -1 for antineutrons and antiprotons.