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Hydrogen         Deuterium          Tritium

A chemist would say "Wait a minute, each of these has one electron and one proton so each behaves the same chemically, they just have different masses."

A nuclear physicist would enlighten him, saying "Well, of course, each of the three flavors has a different number of neutrons. So in this case, the isotopes are the 'flavors' of hydrogen."

A particle physicist hears the word 'neutron' and immediately begins thinking about its constituents, quarks. There are six flavors of quarks:

up        charm         top

down     strange     bottom

Thus, the natural question to ask is "Are quarks composites of yet smaller constituents?"

We have not yet seen any evidence for such compositeness, but ATLAS will delve much deeper. The ATLAS experiment could answer this question.