... "we could barely detect atoms." You're a few decades out of date on the science. Almost a century, really. Atom detection has been ... quite a while. Th

... "we could barely detect atoms." You're a few decades out of date on the science. Almost a century, really. Atom detection has been ... quite a while. The parts of the atom: electron, proton, neutron (all somethings even smaller) started with the electron in 1897. Neutrons lagged until the 1930s. Quarks were hypothesized in 1964. Now, you'll never find free quarks (due to something called color confinement) but we started detecting that the nucleons (protons and neutrons) must have something even smaller inside via scattering experiments around 1968. We were producing charm quarks in 1974. 1977 we observed the bottom quark, and in 1995 we got the heaviest of the bunch, the top quark. The current year is 2023.