One of my professors was fond of saying, "the proton is a garbage dump," to emphasize the mess of gluons and virtual quarks that you see when you start to probe

One of my professors was fond of saying, "the proton is a garbage dump," to emphasize the mess of gluons and virtual quarks that you see when you start to probe the proton. It's also worth noting that the in the LHC, which collides protons, most of the interesting collisions are due to gluons interacting, rather than the quarks.