What is our Universe made out of? At a fundamental level, to the best of our knowledge, the answer is simple: particles and fields. The type of matter that makes up humans, Earth, and all the stars, for example, is all composed of the known particles of the Standard Model. Dark matter is theorized to be a particle, while dark energy is theorized to be a field inherent to space itself. But all the particles that exist, at the core of their nature, are just excited quantum fields themselves. What gives them the properties that they have? In other words: what makes a particle have the properties that it does? Let’s take a deep look.
The particles that we know of have traits that appear to be inherent to them. All particles of the same type — electrons, muons, up quarks, Z-bosons, etc. — are, at some level, indistinguishable from one another.