Photons are an exception (at least, in as much as that they are a particle), and you can make new particls from energy, but definitely there’s a limit to how old a particle can be. No particle is older than the universe (as far as the big bang is concerned).
Are you looking for an inoffensive insult?
It’s possible that Lemmy in general is leftist because the people who came here wanted faster and more effective moderation against hate speech whereas more right wing people didn’t have a particularly strong need or desire for moderation.
I’ve actually been thinking that AI poses a substantial enough existential risk that it probably should be called Abominable Intelligence.
Except the big bang is the start of both space and time, so nothing in the universe could be older than the universe because there’s no time to speak of (not to mention the space for it to exist).
The moment after the big bang is called the Planck epoch. I just learned this from Wikipedia “In this stage, the characteristic scale length of the universe was the Planck length, 1.6×10−35 m, and consequently had a temperature of approximately 1032 degrees Celsius. Even the very concept of a particle breaks down in these conditions. A proper understanding of this period awaits the development of a theory of quantum gravity.”. I don’t really understand this, but it seems the early universe wasn’t conducive to particles. Even if it was, they wouldn’t be atoms. They’d just be quarks.
All of our physics breaks down at the singularity before the big bang, so assuming quarks that are around today existed then is just that, an assumption.