...as opposed to hadrons (and other composte particles) made up by trios of quarks bound together by streams of gauge bosons (gluons that also recursively interact with themselves, generating more gluons), W and Z gauge bosons, and electromagnetic gauge bosons (photons).
That sounds a bit confusing, I’m sure, but aside from the gluons creating other gluons, there’s no recursion. In Chen’s view, it was alternating “turtles all the way down”...
> Finally, how does space and time look like in boson's world, roughly?
Fundamental particles don't really have a size. The size of a particle depends on what force you use to examine it.
Remember that particles can only interact by the fundamental forces, so your typical expectation of a "size" is incorrect. If two particles don't have any forces in common they can pass right through each other - i.e. they don't have an edge that says "I'm here".
So looked at gravitationally or electromagnetically particles have infinite size, and their "existence" (to each other) is not binary "I'm here/I'm not here", but rather they are partially there, in ratio to how strong their interaction is.
Their size as measured by the strong force will be different from their size measured by the weak force.
Composite particles are different - they are made of fundamental particles in some particular spacing. The fundamental particles they are made of have no size, but the spacing between them does have a size, so that's the size they are given.
It would help you to stop thinking of particles as objects, but rather as areas of force, which get weaker the farther away you are. Like a kind of fuzzy ball that fades out, but never goes to zero.
Fundamental particles are pointlike and dimensionless. They have wave-particle duality and have characteristic wavelengths however on the order of 10^-16 m or so for hadrons and quarks are about 2000 smaller.
That sounds a bit confusing, I’m sure, but aside from the gluons creating other gluons, there’s no recursion. In Chen’s view, it was alternating “turtles all the way down”...