Hey, I'm going to tell you a secret. Well. Maybe it's a little misleading to call it a secret, but it's something that a lot of people don't realise and also something that not many people will tell you, even if they know. In any case, the secret is this: particles (that is to say, nucleons, atoms, and their constiuents) may or may not actually exist.

As far as we know, though, the universe certainly acts as if they do. There's a lot of data available to us on this particular subject (you know, all of that matter and whatnot around us) and all of it supports our notions of particles. We use these notions to explore other aspects of the universe, applying them wherever we can, and, as far as we know, it always works. That's no reason to get carried away, though. Science is rad (science might be the most brutal thing I can think of), but it cannot tell us what is and what is not. It can only tell us what we can see. There is probably a lot that we can't see (I mean, goodness gracious, we can only see in three dimensions!), and there are a lot of things that we don't know and cannot know. Most things, really. That doesn't mean we shouldn't believe that which we observe through the scientific method, however, and it doesn't mean that we shouldn't go on believing in atoms.

I feel as though putting this information in the wrong hands could prove slightly unwise. This is true of everything I can tell you (and you me).