No Easy Answers
When I first started my search for the answer to "What is everything?", I hoped for an easy answer just like Democritus. It would be wonderful if everything could be boiled down to something as simple as an atom. But when we go down this rabbit hole, only one thing is clear: Things could not be more complicated.
I can tell you that atoms are made up of quarks, that form neutrons and protons, that form atoms, that form molecules...that eventually turn into that sandwich we started with. Maybe it'll help you at bar trivia sometime. But it turns out the universe is way more complex than we like to think. We've reached the bottom of the rabbit hole, and it's a maze down here.
If you want to understand more, you'd better bone up on your mathematics, because you're going to need it. Or you, like me, can be happy with the bar trivia version.
