As the Big Bang pinhead expands, creating space for short-lived elementary particles to move, they collide into each other, decaying into composite particles compiled of two or three quarks. These are more stable living combinations called “hadrons,” as in the Large Hadron Collider, and they fall into two categories: mesons and baryons.
Galacti reports that most mesons and baryons last for a fraction of a second, but we are constantly discovering new ones. Further, Galacti illustrates the myriad varieties of baryons and mesons that can be composed of any combination of six quarks or six leptons, with the maximum possible number of such composite particles calculated at a staggering 6^6.