Have you ever wondered why all particles of a given type have the same mass and charge etc., even in another galaxy?   The answer may be found way back, just after the Big Bang.  Immediately following the inflation phase and some cooling, but before the annihilation phase, the weak force ruled supreme.

Like a smashed rock, particles of matter were various sized little chunks but without any particular “personality” or properties.  If you have not already read the weak force please do so now to understand the way it works today.  The Weak Force was originally responsible for standardising particles and was busier than ever before or since.  Recall that at this stage (less than 1 µS after the BB) all particles were still close enough to come into repeated contact.

Once things cooled down enough, all kinds of particles started completing energy links to each other.  As particles were pulled together, every possible aggregation was tried, well matched or not, big and small particles of matter, some crowded with couplings and others not.

During these ‘trial marriages’ the weak force was very actively standardizing masses and charges of the particles.  While particles were in contact, source and termination sites migrated to the less crowded ones.  Like water seeking its own level or a gas equalizing its pressure, entropy achieved an average density of sites.  All particles of the same size would thus end up with the same number of sites.  The omnipresent energy potentials then used these sites to form energy links.  Since the pull of links is Mass, electrons now all had the same Mass.

During such a migration, a threshold of imbalance would be reached when the donor was left with more terminations than sources, and the transfer would stop.  If the size of the particle and number of sites also matched the average density, further modification was unlikely and these would become the down, strange and bottom quarks with a charge of –1/3.

Note: Nature did not create a fractional charge.  The fraction is a human designation resulting from the fact that we discovered the electron first and arbitrarily assigned it unity charge.  Had the down quark been discovered first, it would have a charge of –1 and the electron –3.

In other cases the pendulum swings the other way if the donor starts out with excess sources.  By the time it transfers enough mixed sites to reach the opposite threshold of excess terminations, the receiver has taken on a double load of excess sources.  Barring further changes, these would become the up, charm and top quarks with a charge of +2/3. 

If the donor already had a double load of excess terminations, by the time it reaches the threshold of excess sources, the receiver has taken on a triple load of excess terminations.  These were destined to become the electron, muon and tau with a charge of –3/3.  The opposite conditions of course resulted in antiparticles for all of the above.

Does this sound too simple and perfect?  Quite so; In the midst of all this early chaos, only about 77% of particles actually ended up being “standardized”.  Some weak force transfers would be aborted prematurely due to collisions and other particles would not even have time for their ‘first marriage’.  The remaining 23% were misfits and oddball particles that would be left as-is or to form small, very unsatisfied dark matter aggregations.

It is no accident that today, all electrons have the same mass and charge, or that all other currently known particles are similarly “standardized”.  This phenomenon is really not so miraculous if you bear in mind that it is not universal and that about 23% of the original particles ‘slipped through the cracks’ to become dark matter.

These odd-balls and misfits started forming links, and tried to combine in every way possible.  Some of the aggregations formed were really ill matched in terms of size and charge.  Attempts by these particles to establish mutual links resulted in poor internal satisfaction. 

The small size of the aggregations provides inadequate mutual shielding so they cannot form strong bonds and build nucleons for atoms.  Since they cannot be in a nucleus, there are no orbiting or free electrons and there is no emission or absorption of light.  These odd-ball particles and tiny but massive aggregations are thus doomed to a solitary existence as “dark matter”.