Seventeen elementary particles, drawn as characters ─ a new illustrated field guide from Sogensha

Cut a sheet of paper in half, then cut that half in half, and keep going. Particle physics lies at the end of that question — a question children ask all the time. But elementary particles have zero size, no shape, and cannot be seen. The field that draws people in earliest has long been the hardest one to approach.

Part 1 follows how humanity worked its way down that ladder. The microscope arrives in the sixteenth century; by the seventeenth, plants turn out to be made of cells. The electron microscope of the twentieth century reveals the atom, which divides into nucleus and electron, then into protons and neutrons, and finally into quarks. Each time the instrument changed, the smallest unit of the world was revised.

People have always imagined spirits and monsters as a way of giving shape to what cannot be seen. Elementary particles, the authors reasoned, could be approached the same way. Co-author Yukimi Hashimoto is an illustrator whose début work was the children’s book Yuru-yuru Kamisama Zukan: Ancient Egypt, and a researcher of religion and magic in ancient Egyptian art. That background is visible throughout: the characters wear animal ears, wings and costumes drawn from ancient civilisations, and the pages are laid over hand-written field-theory equations as texture. The book is a collaboration between a children’s-book author from the humanities and a working physicist and educator.

Part 2, the heart of the book, borrows the form of a natural-history field guide. Just as animals divide into canids and felids, the particles divide into fermions and bosons, then into the quark, lepton, gauge and scalar tribes, and quarks and leptons divide again into three generations. The taxonomy of the guide is simply the taxonomy of the Standard Model.

The guide covers the six quarks (up, down, strange, charm, bottom, top), the leptons (electron, muon, tauon, neutrino), and the gauge and scalar bosons (gluon, photon, W and Z, Higgs) — seventeen in all. Each name carries a tagline — the quark pair are introduced as “the famous double act of the particle world” — and the characters speak for themselves. Every entry follows the same shape: meet the character on the left page, then get the physics in comics and diagrams on the right.

Between the character pages sit 32 columns: the birth of the universe, antimatter, particles that appear out of “nothing”, Schrödinger’s cat, the electromagnetic spectrum and how to read a Feynman diagram. Further on come Super-Kamiokande and IceCube, sending neutrinos 300 km across Japan, particle physics in medicine, the particle reactions inside a thunderstorm, gravitational-wave observation, quantum teleportation and quantum computing.

The harder the idea, the more homely the analogy. The six quark flavours are served as ice cream: the three with charge −1/3 are mint choc chip, blueberry-and-cheese and matcha; the three with +2/3 are vanilla, strawberry and chocolate, with the three generations arranged on separate tiers. Even the Pauli exclusion principle — no two identical fermions in the same state — arrives as a rule at the ice-cream counter: only one scoop of each flavour per set.

The final chapter of Part 2 belongs to particles that are undiscovered or purely hypothetical: dark matter, dark energy, the graviton and the tachyon.

Part 3, “Go and meet the particles”, is written for what happens next. “Visit an accelerator” explains that facilities normally closed to everyone but researchers open to the public on set days, with photographs and locations for each. Four are covered: KEK in Tsukuba, Ibaraki (founded 1971; the SuperKEKB collider and the Belle II detector), J-PARC in Tokai, Ibaraki, Super-Kamiokande in Kamioka, Gifu (1,000 m underground), and the RI Beam Factory at RIKEN, where the linear accelerator RILAC produced element 113, nihonium, and the superconducting ring cyclotron SRC can be seen on open days.

Accel Kitchen lends particle detectors to secondary-school students free of charge and supports their research in partnership with research institutes. More than 300 detectors have been lent out so far, supporting the work of over 200 students. This book is the doorway to that programme: meet the characters in the guide, follow the physics through the columns, then go and measure something yourself in Part 3 — and from there, the Accel Kitchen programme takes over.

Kazuo Tanaka was born in 1986 and holds a PhD from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo. Drawing on his experience teaching in secondary schools, he founded Accel Kitchen LLC in 2020 to support student research in particle physics. Yukimi Hashimoto holds a master’s degree in history from Komazawa University, has taken part in three-dimensional surveys of archaeological sites, and works on historical supervision and museum art projects alongside her illustration.