As usual, the hard problem is how you define "Elementary" which is why the posters always show 17, and then you get numbers that go as high as 995.5 (and the .5 is an interesting result as well).
Isn't it just a thing that cannot be broken into / explained as a combination of more elementary things? ie. as far as we know an electron is an elementary particle because it can't be split into smaller components nor is there any evidence that it contains something smaller (unlike, say, an atom or a proton).
That's what the various string theory proponents start from. There's "too many" different subatomic particles, so there surely must be something smaller that they're composed of?
How long can you break something apart until you cannot any longer? The things we are breaking apart are illusions in a sense. There will always be a smaller particle because that is what we are looking for.
When we understand that everything that we see is a manifestation of a probability wave, then we will understand everything is a wave and end these foolish experiments.
something that cant be reduced would be the only entity, all other things are assemblages of that entity, the problem of variability occurs, if you can observe at the scale of absolute fundamental structure, how can difference occur?
actually the idea is that nature cant operate at that scale.
the thing about planck units is they are extrapolations that end at single planck length that has some problems just with basic geometry, as well as a supposed instability of a planck space spontaneously collapsing.
a planck unit volume must take a form that has dimensions of single planck units and pack together so that no smaller spacings are created. it cant be a sphere, at best it can be some sort of riemannian tetrahedron or triangle.
it would be conveinient if that level was a 2D plane, but it still has issues.
You don't have to wonder, because they are. They're manifestations of fields.
I think it is a reasonable answer to tell people "if you're looking for the short list of simplest things, the number of types of fields there are is probably what you're looking for".
That doesn't invalidate this question in general, though the number of different answers from people looking at the same thing suggests it may be underspecified.
Letter to John Lighton Synge (9 November 1959), as quoted by Walter Moore in Schrödinger: Life and Thought (1989) ISBN 0521437679
It is not a breakthrough, it is just something we refuse to see, something that was known for a century.
"All is a wave" is the unifying principle. I am no mathematician, but the math needs to start with that fundamental principle.
The very notion of calling it "qunatum" physics is probably wrong since quantum is "a discrete quantity of energy proportional in magnitude to the frequency of the radiation it represents."
And if everything is a wave there are no discrete quantities beyond our definition of what constitutes the end, or borders, of the wave.
> I am no mathematician, but the math needs to start with that fundamental principle.
This is a weird sort of hubris. “I’m not qualified to do this job but I can certainly tell you how it needs to be done.”
> And if everything is a wave there are no discrete quantities beyond our definition of what constitutes the end, or borders, of the wave.
This is not true in multiple ways. First, it’s known that these particles exhibit quantum behavior. This is measured and confirmed over and over. Many measures are in fact quantized.
Second, existing as a wave does not mean no discrete quantities. Even in everyday materials we observe situations like standing waves that are effectively quantized.
> This is a weird sort of hubris. “I’m not qualified to do this job but I can certainly tell you how it needs to be done.”
A quantum state is a mathematical entity that represents a physical system. Since waves are not physical can you see where I can assume that the math needs to start from a different place? If it is even useful at all?
> it’s known that these particles exhibit quantum behavior. Many measures are in fact quantized.
To measure is to quantize, so this is circular reasoning. If particles are always waves we would still see the quantum behavior.
> Second, existing as a wave does not mean no discrete quantities.
Where is the precise point a standing wave ends and begins? The best we can do is guess with calculus and differential equations. Again, yoiu are quantifying things that in and of themselves are not quantized outside of our conception.
> To measure is to quantize, so this is circular reasoning.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding. Measurement (which is a precisely defined mathematical concept) is not the same thing as quantization. For a very basic example, in all known physics theories, including QFT, SR, and GR, space and time can be measured, and they are not quantized. In fact, there is no theory compatible with SR in which space and time can be quantized, given the nature of the Lorenz transform: SR predicts continuous length contraction from the PoV of observers moving at any velocity relative to each other; for any distance of length 1, some other observer can exist for which the length would be 1/x, with x as a real number.
Again, our current theories all agree that space and time are continuous, not quantized. Quantized space or time are not consistent with either QFT or GR.
Now, we do know that QFT and GR are not consistent with each other, so at least one new theory is necessary, at least one of them must be wrong. So the new theory could involve quantized space or time - but it could very well not. We don't know at the moment, and all we know is that our best theories, limited as they may be, require continuous space and time (and other quantities).
Either you understand this stuff at a level so much deeper than me that I can’t comprehend what you’re getting at or you are way out of your depth because none of this makes any sense to me.
Waves aren’t physical but everything is waves? We can’t measure standing waves but have to “guess” with calculus and differential equations?
Let’s take calculating the area of a circle. Since pi is in an irrational number that goes on forever, we can only get a closer approximation to an area circle by extending the decimals of pi. But since pi goes on forever, we can never know the exact area of aLet’s take calculating the area of a circle. Since pi is in a irrational number that goes on forever, we can only get a closer approximation to an area circle by extending the decimals of pi. But since pi goes on forever, we can never know the exact area of a circle.
Hard pass. The exact area of a circle is pi*r^2. We can calculate decimals of pi arbitrarily far, certainly further than our ability to measure. “Exact area” means we use symbolic math, not that we quibble about significant digits.
“Hence, not only is it impossible to ever determine the exact value of the area of a circle, but it is equally impossible to measure any area with 100% accuracy.”
Your own link confirms this is not true. Irrational is not the same thing as infinite.
> You seem to be avoiding the question of how we can know the exact area of a circle knowing that pi is infinite.
I’m not avoiding it. I’m saying it’s a meaningless question. 16 digits of pi will be more precise than essentially anything we can measure. Just 3 digits of pi will probably be more precise than you can measure at home.
If you need perfection, you stick with symbolic math. If you need to convert to absolute physical units, your ability to measure will be your limit, not the irrationality of pi.
> Very fact that this well-known scientific truth is hard to accept those people is telling.
It’s not hard to accept. It’s not interesting. There are no physical problems related to this fact. And no interesting philosophical problems.
Your problem isn’t that you lack the knowledge but that you are overconfident in your ignorance. You lack the curiosity to ask why no one is impressed or convinced by your beliefs, instead assuming everyone else is missing the deep insights you believe you possess.
This is why you can cite someone’s article about everything being quantum waves as support for your personal beliefs while also confidently stating that the article’s author is completely wrong for believing in quantum waves. Because you are not looking for information. You are looking for confirmation. You are rendered blind by your hubris.
In quantum physics, "quantized" means that a field has a smallest possible excitation, called a quantum, rather than being able to vary continuously.
For example, the quantum of the electromagnetic field is the photon.
A quantum field is fundamentally quantized, so the waves that arise in quantum fields are similarly quantized.
> Again, you are quantifying things that in and of themselves are not quantized outside of our conception.
No, we have extremely strong evidence that the physical fields themselves are quantized. If you try to model physics using classical waves - which we do, e.g. in semiclassical electrodynamics, which models the electromagnetic field as continuous instead of quantized field - you find there are limits to what can accurately be modeled. To get an accurate model, you need to quantize the field.
> It is not a breakthrough, it is just something we refuse to see, something that was known for a century.
This sounds like you're about to try selling me a crystal and a magic ritual. The wording here is far too grandiose, and I assure you physicists are not "refusing to see" that "everything is a wave". Whatever you imagine that might mean.
> The very notion of calling it "qunatum" physics is probably wrong since quantum is "a discrete quantity of energy proportional in magnitude to the frequency of the radiation it represents."
> And if everything is a wave there are no discrete quantities beyond our definition of what constitutes the end, or borders, of the wave.
Mumbo-jumbo.
It's called "quantum" physics because of the discovery that many parts of nature do indeed exist in discrete steps. Yes, electron orbitals are described with wave functions - that is, the electron exists as a probability cloud, but the functions themselves are still discrete! When an electron gains energy, it jumps from one orbital to another without passing through a continuous state in the middle. That is the fundamental insight of Quantum Mechanics - energy, momentum, etc are all quantized and not actually continuous.
Isn’t the wave function only discrete when we measure it?
The field is the continuous state so nothing has to jump through anything.
For example the hydrogen wave function does not tell us where the electron will be located, only where most likely will be located. What is discrete about that?
> Isn’t the wave function only discrete when we measure it?
No.
> The field is the continuous state so nothing has to jump through anything.
No.
> For example the hydrogen wave function does not tell us where the electron will be located, only where most likely will be located. What is discrete about that?
Read what I wrote again. The wave function itself is continuous but the jump between states (aka between wave functions) is discrete. This is because energy is quantized and does not exist in continuous quantities. The transfer of energy in quantum systems is therefore discrete, which is the whole reason it is called quantum mechanics.
I am not sure there’s any breakthrough here, but this article is about a different QM interpretation (as opposed to Copenhagen or Many Worlds). Interesting but seems irrelevant to the discussion here of particles and fields.
Yes. This is why Physicists will reject the "everything is a wave theory" till the bitter end. They become frustrated when faced with the un-measurable.
There is no "quantum wave", there are only waves. Immeasurable, undefinable waves.
Earlier you wrote, "Everything is a quantum wave." You also linked to an article titled, "The Everything-Is-a-Quantum-Wave Interpretation of Quantum Physics."
Yeah, I can see how it looks that way. I did not say everything is the quantum wave. I said everything is a wave, but the research paper i linked to uses the sloppy term Everything is a quantum wave. While I agree with the author I disagree with the title and terminology
> Now, when I told my editor at Allen Lane about my own interpretation, he immediately said “It’s Many Worlds on steroids!” There is a grain of truth in that, ...
Dude, this is an answer to an entirely different question. He's proposing an interpretation of QM, which is independent from "how many fundamental particles".
Not all fields interact with all other fields. You can think of them as a loosely coupled graph…
There might be any number of graph components with no connectivity to our fields at all, and we’d never know. Assuming, of course, that we’re including gravity in this logic.
There’s also might be any number of arbitrarily complex components which are only connected through gravity. That’s a decent candidate for what the dark sector actually is.
Every particle type has its own field, but the OP article is counting a single particle type multiple times based on properties like spin and polarization. At one point the article reaches the number 118. That corresponds directly to 37 quantum fields once you take the "double counting" into account.
37 is what you get from counting Dirac matter fields (24) plus gauge fields (12) plus the Higgs. That's post-symmetry-breaking, and doesn't account for chirality.
If you count fundamental field components in the electroweak-symmetric Lagrangian, you get 43. I broke down both of those numbers in my comment linked above.
> If you pick and choose which properties to select as unique fields, maybe you can get the number 37, but at that point why not 118 fields?
There's no picking and choosing involved - quite the opposite. It's counting what the QFT math specifies. Particles with e.g. different color charges can't share the same field. To get to 17 from either of the above, you have to ignore quark color charges and the different gluon types. It's essentially a classification of types of particles that combines field together, it's not a count of fields.
No, that's just the vacuum state of any of the standard quantum fields.
"Field" is being used there in its general sense, of a quantity that has a value for every point in space and time. It's saying that in a (region of a) quantum field that contains no activity, there are nevertheless random fluctuations, which can themselves be modeled as a field. But they're not separate from the quantum field that gives rise to them - they have all the same fundamental properties.
...and a field is just a value that behaves in a particular way. An example outside QFT: phonons [1] behave like particles, but there is no "palpable" sound field, there's only local distribution of implulses of the molecules of air (or whatever medium) where the sound propagates.
Other fields can be seen as attributes of the space itself, and "elementary particles" as wrinkles on it. Gravity is special because it bends the very geometry of space.
> Gravity is special because it bends the very geometry of space.
It's important to remember that this is not true in QFT, and QFT is not true in GR. That is, the math of QFT does not work if spacetime can become curved (at least, if it can become significantly curved).
Maybe you want to leaf through a copy of Birrell & Davies or Parker & Toms again. QFTCS is good in strong gravity, and is as good as anything else at transplanckian scale (which is to say there's presently no way of knowing when around there QFTCS becomes a bad approximation to an unknown quantum gravity).
We should also remember the enormous cosmological curvature in which testable quantum systems exist; it's not just about compact objects. Significant? There's observed H-sources above z ~ 15, and of course the CMB photons at z ~ 1100. Indeed, B&D deals with Robertson-Walker spacetimes over several chapters before they get to black holes.
Also at the weak but measurable curvature regime there's e.g. Pound-Rebka, time metrology[1], and so forth, and lots of spacecraft confirming the strong equivalence principle (e.g. MESSENGER, LAGEOS) and thus supporting the LLI one expects to find in relativistic QFTs of the sort one would use to describe the behaviour of laser altimeters, distant astrophysical masers (and the Lyman-alpha forest), the spectral lines in stellar atmospheres and so on.
> if you're looking for the short list of simplest things, the number of types of fields there are is probably what you're looking for
Definitely. It's rather strange that the OP article doesn't even mention the word "field". It seems that people in general have a hard time letting go of the idea of particles as fundamental.
A good overview of this is "There are no particles, there are only fields" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.4616) by physics prof Art Hobson.
Fields collapse the zoo described in the article significantly, because particles and antiparticles arise from the same field, and similarly, spin, polarization, and helicity are properties of the same field. Taking this into account, the 118 particles number that the article reaches at one point drops to 37 fields.
You've said that "37 fields" at least twice. It doesn't seem to come from the arxiv article you linked, though. And it seems rather high to me. (Of course, 118 seems ridiculously high...)
Anyway: Would you list them? Or supply a link to somewhere that does?
First, just to clarify - there are different ways to count the quantum fields, just as there are different ways to count particles, as the article points out. You really need to specify the premises you're using to count them. But either 17 or 37 are natural counts. 17 is a somewhat simplified version, which ignores quark color charges and groups the W and Z bosons together.
Here's how the list of 37 typically breaks down:
18 quark fields: 6 flavors x 3 colors
3 charged leptons: electron, muon, tau
3 neutral leptons: neutrinos corresponding to the charged leptons
(Note: this refers to fields as we observe them today, essentially counting what are known as Dirac fields. These are not the more fundamental fields that were present before the electromagnetic force separated from the weak nuclear force in the early universe, a process known as electroweak symmetry breaking. More on this below.)
In writing that list out, I realized that it skips one of the properties the article mentioned: chirality. If we take that into account, the number of charged lepton fields doubles to 6, and we have 40 fundamental quantum fields.
The reason that distinction is often ignored is that at everyday energies, the left- and right-handed components of particles are essentially blended together, so experiments don’t see them as separate particle types. Treating left- and right-handed chirality as a single field is a simplification of the underlying electroweak theory. Treating them as distinct particles, as the article does, is actually a bit dubious.
Re electroweak symmetry breaking, if we're really looking for "fundamental", then it makes sense to look at the fields before symmetry breaking. In a very real sense, these are more fundamental, because they give rise to the fields we observe.
But, that gets into fields that most non-physicists won't recognize, and that don't even have good names: the weak isospin gauge fields W^1_\mu,\; W^2_\mu,\; W^3_\mu,\; and the hypercharge field B_\mu.
In that scenario, there are 4 Higgs fields, which brings the total field count to 43. After symmetry breaking, those extra 3 Higgs fields became longitudinal polarization modes of the electroweak bosons, which are not counted as extra fields. The article mentions this, "the W+, W−, and Z bosons have a third, “longitudinal” polarization state as well," and adds them to its particle count.
We can relate this all back to the article as follows:
1. To count antiparticles, group the quarks and leptons into fermions - 18 + 3 + 3 = 24, and double that to count antiparticles, giving 48. Bosons are their own antiparticles, so their count doesn't change. The total particle count is now 48 fermions + 12 gauge bosons + 1 Higgs = 61.
2. For spin/polarization, double the number of fermions again to 96, double the number of gluons from to 16, multiply photons by 2, multiply the 3 electroweak bosons by 3 giving 9. This gives 96 fermions + 2 photons + 16 gluons + 9 electroweak bosons + 1 Higgs boson = 124 particles.
That 124 is 6 more than the 118 mentioned in the article, but again it depends on exactly what you're counting. Chirality in particular complicates things, because of the blending issue I mentioned earlier.
I'm a bit surprised that the weightier generations of fermions are categorized as fundamentally different fields. Is this a crutch/temporary classification that we expect to be resolved with further research, or are there real indications that the apparent similarities between e.g. up/charm/top are fully independent manifestations?
I can speak definitively on behalf of the Standard Model here:
"No idea, bro!"
It's one of the biggest open questions about the Standard Model, and it's considered an indication that the model is probably incomplete.
Btw you mentioned "weightier generations", but mass is a consequence of the difference between the generations, not the fundamental difference. Before electroweak symmetry breaking, those particles had no mass, but they already existed as three distinct generations, with different Yukawa couplings. When the Higgs field acquired a vacuum expectation value, those different couplings became different masses.
The Standard Model treats the number of generations and the Yukawa couplings as fundamental inputs to the theory. There's a Nobel Prize waiting for whoever figures out whatever might be behind this.
Even string theory doesn't solve this. Calabi-Yau manifolds provide a model which could explain it in theory, but no actual, concrete solution has been found.
But of course one can then question why are there exactly N different types of fields, with their specific types of interaction (at least in our universe)? Why should we suppose that this is the most fundamental description of reality, rather than being emergent from something else?
Well, why would there be fewer than N? There is no general principle that we can impose on the world, it just is, we can only discover what the laws and components of the world are (hopefully). I'm not claiming it's impossible for there to be fewer fields than we think right now. But there is no reason to believe there should be.
I'm not saying fewer fields, but perhaps a more fundamental substrate to reality than fields that fields emerge from. Maybe the N fields are just vibrational modes or attractor dynamics of something simpler.
It seems there has to be a reason WHY there are exactly N fields, and WHY they interact in the ways they do.
Edit: As I noted in another comment, the best explanation may come down to "there are only 100 viable types of universe, and ours is type 42". I'd be happy with that.
I think it's very obvious no such answer is even possible in principle. Mathematics has no limits, you can describe anything you like by picking some axioms. Do you want to make sense of the expression 1+1=3? I can find axioms in which this is true.
So, there is no way to start from mathematics and find something that must exist in some way, such as "there can only be 100 types of universe". Any such discovery is contingent upon some arbitrary choice of axioms. You can choose axioms that appeal to some ultimately esthetic sense of elegance or simplicity, and that can explain our universe more or less uniquely, but this doesn't mean that they are right to any extent more than the SM is.
We can certainly imagine part of what the GP comment described being true: "a more fundamental substrate to reality than fields that fields emerge from." In fact, many physicists assume that's the case with the Standard Model - that e.g. the similarities between generations of quantum particle are explained by some deeper and (hopefully) simpler construct.
Similarly, "Maybe the N fields are just vibrational modes or attractor dynamics of something simpler" could also be true - Calibi-Yau manifolds in string theory are essentially one such attempt to unify the similar and repetitive aspects of QFT that currently have no theoretically-justified connection in the theory.
Sure, at some level you presumably hit a wall - e.g. "why are there Calabi Yau manifolds?" But I don't think that's what the GP was referring to.
> Any such discovery is contingent upon some arbitrary choice of axioms.
This is true, but we see some wonderful examples of this in the real universe, producing laws that must be true in all universes that satisfy the axioms (assuming we believe that mathematical proofs aren't somehow tied to our universe.)
For example, Noether's theorem tells us mathematically when and why conservation laws, like conservation of energy and momentum, exist (i.e., for any continuous symmetry of the action of a physical system with conservative forces.)
Similarly, the inverse square law applies to anything that propagates, with no losses, outwards from a point in all directions in locally flat three-dimensional space. Again, we expect this to be true in any universe with these properties.
There are quite a number of other examples of this.
Elegance. It's Occam's razor. If we can do with only one field, it's probably it.
It's inductive and abductive reasoning. The one field, and it has lot of mathematical characteristics which makes it unique on its own, and also it is the only one that has a chance to fit, is the e8 field popularized by Garrett Lisi.
If a universe were to be designed based using the e8 Lie algebra as an elemental field, it would look a lot like our universe.
Currently the standard model is a patchwork of field added as experiments for observing particles were possible to realize. The big picture's view is a unified theory which fits perfectly all existing data.
Occam's razor has nothing to do with this, it only applies once you have multiple competing theories - you can't use Occam's razor to decide that a theory "should" exist.
Currently, we don't have any theory that works that's any simpler than the SM. So that's the theory that Occam's razor currently tells us must be true, as it's the simplest alternative that actually works.
I'd also observe that between dark matter and dark energy, there's good reason to believe that we may not have a full accounting of all fields.
I am just observing that if you have a non-scientist asking the question "how many fundamental particles are there", with the expectation that "995.5" is not really the right answer, "the number of fields" is a reasonable response that probably gets closer to what they are looking for. Even if someday someone does get them to all be some manifestations of a single field it would arguably still be the case that people are more interested in the answer of the current number of fields then being told "1", because "1" is in many ways not a helpful answer to "how many types of things are there". Even if there is a profound sense in which it was true, there would still be a profound sense in which it was false, too.
> But of course one can then question why are there exactly N different types of fields, with their specific types of interaction (at least in our universe)?
Even that has a (still unsatisfactory) answer.
Poincaré symmetry imposes constraints on the kinds of fields we can have. Gauge symmetry shows us how they may couple.
There are still some arbitrary selections of the possible permutations that nature has “picked”.
Interesting, but (way out of my depth here) why do these symmetries have to exist?
It would be much more satisfying (not that nature exists to be satisfying) if we could explain our universe starting from some universal constraints on things that must be true of any non-random mechanistic universe, plus some set of (< N) non-forced "it must be A or B" additional constraints, then be able to derive everything known about our universe - fields and symmetries etc - (& ideally predict something unknown) as resulting from some particular selection of those additional constraints.
This seems about as close as we could get to explaining our universe... Basically saying that god flipped a coin marked A and B, and it come down A so here we are. Maybe god kept on flipping sets of coins and created a whole bunch of other universes too, whose physics we could also derive.... and maybe one day visit and confirm.
You might not want to visit because it's probable you would explode or have some other horrific death due to incompatibility between your fields and theirs.
See "Schild's Ladder" by Greg Egan: a science experiment creates a bubble of new physics expanding at 0.5 c, and humanity is forced to flee the expansion while some stay right next to the expanding boundary to investigate the inside.
To me it looks like the periodic table. There's an underlying set of levers in terms of quantum characteristics of fields, but not all settings of these levers are stable. This is just like how only atoms with certain combos of protons and neutrons and electrons are neutral and stable.
If you look at histogram plots of protons, neutrons, and stability, it's not a perfectly idealized form. It's a rocky plot. This emerges from the quantized nature of reality.
So a periodic table of particles (fields) that looks kind of weird and ad-hoc to us is the expected result.
What we don't yet fully understand is really two things as far as I know. First, we know less about why these particular values are special. For the periodic table we actually understand this pretty well. Second, we do not know if there are other islands of stability or particles-fields we cannot see (e.g. WIMPS). For the periodic table we are pretty sure there are no large islands of stability at higher weights. Not 100% sure, but if they do exist there's probably only a few exotic mega-atoms that could be stable, not many.
Even though "particle photon" and "wave photon" are used alternatively, they are just convenient ways of talking about the behavior of the same "photon field". The same way when we say "it is raining" we don't mean that there is a "it" that "rains", we should try avoid taking these descriptions too literally.
That being said, is difficult because we are using language to describe very-much-not-everyday stuff. We all need mental hooks to anchor new knowledge and most of our intuition is based on the classical (not-quantum) world aroud us.
Even if we use "wave photon" and "particle photon" alternatively, they are only convenient ways of talking about the behavior of the "photon field". The same way when we say "it is raining" we don't mean there is an "it" that "rains" we should try to avoid giving too much litteral meaning to these descriptions.
That said, I get it is difficult, especially because we are using everyday language to talk about very-much-not-everyday stuff. We all needental hooks to anchor new knowledge and most of our intuition comes from the classical (not-quantum) world around us.
As a physicist, I feel the art is in learning when to use what description, what Sean Carrol calls "poetic naturalism".
> I have to wonder if all these particles are somehow manifestations of a simpler thing.
Someone else already mentioned that yes, they're manifestations of quantum fields. This is well established - the dominant theory of particle physics, the Standard Model, is a theory of quantum fields.
In that context, a particle is simply the smallest excitation of a quantum field that can be detected. Fields can be "excited" (fluctuate) in many different ways, and the OP article is interpreting each one of those as a different type of particle. It's misleading.
You might be interested to look up the Williamson-Van der Mark model. It says that an electron is just light that loops in on itself and shows how properties like mass, charge and spin can emerge from such a geometry. It's fascinating because it opens up the question whether every particle could be described in terms of different ways light can loop in on itself.
Actually I’m not alluding to anything specific. I just wondered whether the 17ness of wallpaper groups and fundamental particles was some sort of mapping from a related common object. Obviously a long shot as previously mentioned.
IMHO, I like to count the x3 colors of quarks and the x2 chirality of bosons. So I get 16*3 fermions and 1+8?+3?+1 bosons, in total 61 but the number of bosons is not a hill I will do die on.
On the other extreme, there are some proposal to reduce the number of particles, in particular it makes a lot of sense to consider the electron and neutrino as a single class of particle, and the up and down quark as a single class of particle, so I guess the number goes down to 6 fermions + 4 bosons = 10? in total (I'd keep chirality, so perhaps 12+4=16?).
And there are even more extreme proposals to consider quarks and leptons in a single bag of mud. In particular this was popular like twenty years ago, but the experiments disagree (IIRC by a small amount, IIRC it's not a very bad approximation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi%E2%80%93Glashow_model I tried to count the particles there and I gave up, let's say a lot.
And you still have to add gravitons (and their weird cousin particles) and perhaps more than one Higgs bosons. So the number should increase in the future.
And there are still ideas to add a global x2, because it would be nice if every bososn has an undiscovered fermion companion and vice versa. IIRC it's falling out of fashion because the simple versions don't agree with the experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry but it sounds interesting :(
---
In conclusion: Don't get too attached to the number 17.
Something like "17 different values of mass"[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] is a good simple model, if you allow me to put enough footnotes at the end. Different particles have different mass, and we can use the mass to classify them and call it a day and so we get 17.
[1] Actually the photons and the gluons have mass=0, but nobody would confuse them. So, let's count them as different particles. (If it exist, the graviton also has mass=0 too.)
[2] There is something weird with the W and Z particles, Hardcore particle physicist may claim they are the same particle and give a two hour talk about the apparent difference of mass.
[3] There is something weird with the mass of neutrinos. Don't ask unless you really love linear algebra.
[4] There may be details that I'm hiding on purpouse.
[5] There are details that I forgot. I studied this a long time ago.
[6] There are details that I never learned, perhaps more than what I expect.
Hmm if a particle is a quantized packet of a field, then if multiple quantizations are possible in a field, then it's possible for more particles than fields?
Stopped reading after "Yet in the mathematical equations that define the Standard Model, the eight gluons are distinct from one another in the same way that the W and Z bosons differ."
W and Z bosons, photons, etc have fixed masses, charges, interaction strengths with other particles. These properties can exactly be listed and looked up in a table of elementary particles with discrete rows.
Gluon color is continuous property in a vector space. Gluons can have any color in that space, with any combination of the 8 basis vectors (and that choice of basis is also completely arbitrary). The color |g1> is no more valid than the color (|g1> + |g2> + |g8> / √3) or any other of infinite combinations.
Calling this "8 gluons" is like saying there's "3 photons" because they can have momentum in 3 dimensions. If you want to argue there's infinite kinds of gluons, go ahead, but there aren't 8.
> W and Z bosons, photons, etc have fixed masses, charges, interaction strengths with other particles.
But you can form a continuous set of linear combinations of these things, just as you can with gluons. Indeed, what the article calls W and Z bosons (and photons) are just such linear combinations--the ones that appear in the low energy limit after the electroweak phase transition occurs. Before that phase transition, different linear combinations (i.e., a different basis of the electroweak vector space) are the ones that naturally appear. So saying that there are two W, one Z, and one photon is really counting basis vectors in the electroweak vector space, just as saying there are 8 gluons is really counting basis vectors in the gluon sector of the strong interaction vector space.
In a hypothetical scenario where we were inventing the standard model in the first 10^-11 seconds after the big bang, you're right there would be an analogy there. But in that scenario, our standard model would say there was one electroweak particle, not that there were 8 gluons.
In our own universe, the fact that electroweak symmetry breaks ensures there are 4 electroweak particles and not other combinations. There's no corresponding thing to contain gluons to individual particles, you'd need laws of physics we don't have to add that constraint.
> in that scenario, our standard model would say there was one electroweak particle
No, it wouldn't. There would still be four; they would just be called W1, W2, W3, and B. The electroweak vector space doesn't change when the electroweak symmetry is broken; it has 4 basis vectors before, and 4 basis vectors after. All that changes is which basis is the most "natural" to use in describing physics at the given energy scale.
(And there would still be eight gluons as well--what I say below about those applies just as well above the electroweak symmetry breaking energy scale as below.)
> There's no corresponding thing to contain gluons to individual particles
If you mean that there is no "natural" choice of basis for the gluon vector space, that's not quite true either. The Gell-Mann matrices are a natural choice of basis for the adjoint representation of SU(3) (or, equivalently, the defining representation of the Lie Algebra of SU(3)), which is the gluon representation. Those eight matrices are what physicists typically are referring to when they refer to the eight gluons.
The gluon with color (|g1> + |g2> + |g8>) / √3 is just a superposition of the gluons with colors g1, g2 and g8, the same way you can make superpositions of any other particles. You are right that the choice of basis vectors is arbitrary, but that doesn't make it wrong to count the number of dimensions. It also doesn't make it fundamentally different than, say, polarizations of photons or even flavors of quarks. You can have superpositions of photon polarizations or quark flavors.
All of these are continuous properties in an n-dimensional vector space.
8 color indices, why not call that 8 particles what is the point of commenting like you are better than the article when you so clearly show you are not in one sentence never speak on physics again please
I'm not a physicist (so take this with a grain of salt) but I have spent a lot of time trying to find an answer to this question. If you interpret the physics before Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking as more fundamental, and you treat the antimatter fields as distinct, then I think you can reasonably claim that there are 30 fundamental fermion fields. Specifically, in each of the 3 generations, you have:
1. The left-handed lepton doublet field, and the antimatter equivalent.
2. The left-handed quark doublet field, and the antimatter equivalent.
3. The right-handed electron singlet field, and the antimatter equivalent.
4. The right-handed up-quark singlet field, and the antimatter equivalent.
5. The right-handed down-quark singlet field, and the antimatter equivalent.
The bosons are more confusing to me, but I think a reasonable person might say that there are 16 fundamental boson fields:
1. The four scalar boson fields.
2. The eight gluon fields.
3. The three W boson fields.
4. The B boson field.
The B boson couples to every fermion (via hypercharge), while gluons only couple to quarks (via color) and W bosons only couple to the doublets (via weak isospin).
Physicist here. I don’t buy some of these distinctions, like the chirality. Chirality is an observable, it’s like saying there are two photons because they can come in two polarizations, but polarization is not an inherent property: it depends on how we measure it. So I could describe any photon in the left/right chiral basis just as well as in the vertical/horizontal basis or any two antipodal points in the Poincaré sphere, so which is the “right one”? Neither. Spin on the other hand (which is where polarization comes from) is well-defined for any photon and it’s always 1 (the astute reader will wonder why the projection of spin 1 does not take 3 eigenvalues 1,0,-1 and it’s because photons are massless so the 0 projection never occurs because there is no rest frame for massless particles).
Chirality is a real property of (most) elementary particles. For example the electron with left chirality has a weak hypercharge of -1, but the electron with right chirality has a weak hypercharge of 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_hypercharge#Definition In some sense, they are very different particles. Also, only the left version interact with the weak interaction.
I expected the article to explain "helicity" and then say "and chirality is almost the same (for fast particles)", that is good enough for not specialist. There are a few graphics here and there that show helicity, but that paragraph in the text is totally unintelligible and the only conclusion is that there is something with right and left.
> it’s like saying there are two photons because they can come in two polarizations
The article claimed exactly that! It said, "Not everyone counts these different chiral and polarization states as distinct particle types. Yet it’s logical to do so, because they affect how particles behave and interact."
At one point the author reaches a particle count of 118. This corresponds to the degrees of freedom of the on-shell physical states (polarizations, spin orientations, colors, and antimatter) of all particles in the Standard Model. As you say, it's misleading to call this a count of different particles.
I feel like you ought to be go lower than 17, down to 9, by not counting the 3 generations of fermions as distinct (so you've just got up-type quark, down-type quark, electron-type particle, and neutrino). After all, if they can mix with one another, should they really be considered entirely different particles?
Might there have been a point in time (long ago) where the “wave photon” and the “particle photon” seemed like possibly different things?
When we understand that everything that we see is a manifestation of a probability wave, then we will understand everything is a wave and end these foolish experiments.
And by difference, I mean, establish boundaries between objects.
the thing about planck units is they are extrapolations that end at single planck length that has some problems just with basic geometry, as well as a supposed instability of a planck space spontaneously collapsing.
a planck unit volume must take a form that has dimensions of single planck units and pack together so that no smaller spacings are created. it cant be a sphere, at best it can be some sort of riemannian tetrahedron or triangle.
it would be conveinient if that level was a 2D plane, but it still has issues.
I think it is a reasonable answer to tell people "if you're looking for the short list of simplest things, the number of types of fields there are is probably what you're looking for".
That doesn't invalidate this question in general, though the number of different answers from people looking at the same thing suggests it may be underspecified.
Or wave. Everything is a quantum wave.
https://www.vlatkovedral.com/everything-in-the-universe-is-a...
"I insist upon the view that 'all is waves'."
It is not a breakthrough, it is just something we refuse to see, something that was known for a century."All is a wave" is the unifying principle. I am no mathematician, but the math needs to start with that fundamental principle.
The very notion of calling it "qunatum" physics is probably wrong since quantum is "a discrete quantity of energy proportional in magnitude to the frequency of the radiation it represents."
And if everything is a wave there are no discrete quantities beyond our definition of what constitutes the end, or borders, of the wave.
This is a weird sort of hubris. “I’m not qualified to do this job but I can certainly tell you how it needs to be done.”
> And if everything is a wave there are no discrete quantities beyond our definition of what constitutes the end, or borders, of the wave.
This is not true in multiple ways. First, it’s known that these particles exhibit quantum behavior. This is measured and confirmed over and over. Many measures are in fact quantized.
Second, existing as a wave does not mean no discrete quantities. Even in everyday materials we observe situations like standing waves that are effectively quantized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_wave
A quantum state is a mathematical entity that represents a physical system. Since waves are not physical can you see where I can assume that the math needs to start from a different place? If it is even useful at all?
> it’s known that these particles exhibit quantum behavior. Many measures are in fact quantized.
To measure is to quantize, so this is circular reasoning. If particles are always waves we would still see the quantum behavior.
> Second, existing as a wave does not mean no discrete quantities.
Where is the precise point a standing wave ends and begins? The best we can do is guess with calculus and differential equations. Again, yoiu are quantifying things that in and of themselves are not quantized outside of our conception.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding. Measurement (which is a precisely defined mathematical concept) is not the same thing as quantization. For a very basic example, in all known physics theories, including QFT, SR, and GR, space and time can be measured, and they are not quantized. In fact, there is no theory compatible with SR in which space and time can be quantized, given the nature of the Lorenz transform: SR predicts continuous length contraction from the PoV of observers moving at any velocity relative to each other; for any distance of length 1, some other observer can exist for which the length would be 1/x, with x as a real number.
Yet…
Because we do not have the formulas does not mean they are not quantized.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-time-quantized...
Now, we do know that QFT and GR are not consistent with each other, so at least one new theory is necessary, at least one of them must be wrong. So the new theory could involve quantized space or time - but it could very well not. We don't know at the moment, and all we know is that our best theories, limited as they may be, require continuous space and time (and other quantities).
Waves aren’t physical but everything is waves? We can’t measure standing waves but have to “guess” with calculus and differential equations?
Do you agree or disagree with that statement?
You seem to be avoiding the question of how we can know the exact area of a circle knowing that pi is infinite.
I am saying that the area of a circle is impossible to know. And that has both philosophical and physical ramifications.
Very fact that this well-known scientific truth is hard to accept those people is telling.
https://www.scienceabc.com/pure-sciences/can-the-area-of-a-c...
“Hence, not only is it impossible to ever determine the exact value of the area of a circle, but it is equally impossible to measure any area with 100% accuracy.”
Your own link confirms this is not true. Irrational is not the same thing as infinite.
> You seem to be avoiding the question of how we can know the exact area of a circle knowing that pi is infinite.
I’m not avoiding it. I’m saying it’s a meaningless question. 16 digits of pi will be more precise than essentially anything we can measure. Just 3 digits of pi will probably be more precise than you can measure at home.
If you need perfection, you stick with symbolic math. If you need to convert to absolute physical units, your ability to measure will be your limit, not the irrationality of pi.
> Very fact that this well-known scientific truth is hard to accept those people is telling.
It’s not hard to accept. It’s not interesting. There are no physical problems related to this fact. And no interesting philosophical problems.
Your problem isn’t that you lack the knowledge but that you are overconfident in your ignorance. You lack the curiosity to ask why no one is impressed or convinced by your beliefs, instead assuming everyone else is missing the deep insights you believe you possess.
This is why you can cite someone’s article about everything being quantum waves as support for your personal beliefs while also confidently stating that the article’s author is completely wrong for believing in quantum waves. Because you are not looking for information. You are looking for confirmation. You are rendered blind by your hubris.
You're confusing "quantify" with "quantize".
To measure is to quantify, not to quantize.
In quantum physics, "quantized" means that a field has a smallest possible excitation, called a quantum, rather than being able to vary continuously.
For example, the quantum of the electromagnetic field is the photon.
A quantum field is fundamentally quantized, so the waves that arise in quantum fields are similarly quantized.
> Again, you are quantifying things that in and of themselves are not quantized outside of our conception.
No, we have extremely strong evidence that the physical fields themselves are quantized. If you try to model physics using classical waves - which we do, e.g. in semiclassical electrodynamics, which models the electromagnetic field as continuous instead of quantized field - you find there are limits to what can accurately be modeled. To get an accurate model, you need to quantize the field.
This sounds like you're about to try selling me a crystal and a magic ritual. The wording here is far too grandiose, and I assure you physicists are not "refusing to see" that "everything is a wave". Whatever you imagine that might mean.
> The very notion of calling it "qunatum" physics is probably wrong since quantum is "a discrete quantity of energy proportional in magnitude to the frequency of the radiation it represents."
> And if everything is a wave there are no discrete quantities beyond our definition of what constitutes the end, or borders, of the wave.
Mumbo-jumbo.
It's called "quantum" physics because of the discovery that many parts of nature do indeed exist in discrete steps. Yes, electron orbitals are described with wave functions - that is, the electron exists as a probability cloud, but the functions themselves are still discrete! When an electron gains energy, it jumps from one orbital to another without passing through a continuous state in the middle. That is the fundamental insight of Quantum Mechanics - energy, momentum, etc are all quantized and not actually continuous.
The wikipedia article on quantum mechanics literally covers this in the intro - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics
The field is the continuous state so nothing has to jump through anything.
For example the hydrogen wave function does not tell us where the electron will be located, only where most likely will be located. What is discrete about that?
No.
> The field is the continuous state so nothing has to jump through anything.
No.
> For example the hydrogen wave function does not tell us where the electron will be located, only where most likely will be located. What is discrete about that?
Read what I wrote again. The wave function itself is continuous but the jump between states (aka between wave functions) is discrete. This is because energy is quantized and does not exist in continuous quantities. The transfer of energy in quantum systems is therefore discrete, which is the whole reason it is called quantum mechanics.
(The philosophy of that admittedly gets messy, though, e.g. "are fields real objects?")
There is no "quantum wave", there are only waves. Immeasurable, undefinable waves.
Earlier you wrote, "Everything is a quantum wave." You also linked to an article titled, "The Everything-Is-a-Quantum-Wave Interpretation of Quantum Physics."
You seem to be contradicting yourself.
I quoted your own comment: "Everything is a quantum wave."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48698834
Dude, this is an answer to an entirely different question. He's proposing an interpretation of QM, which is independent from "how many fundamental particles".
[Edit: I suppose I'm imagining waves or frequencies of waves, rather than fields, hence why in my imagination there would be an infinite variety]
There might be any number of graph components with no connectivity to our fields at all, and we’d never know. Assuming, of course, that we’re including gravity in this logic.
There’s also might be any number of arbitrarily complex components which are only connected through gravity. That’s a decent candidate for what the dark sector actually is.
If you pick and choose which properties to select as unique fields, maybe you can get the number 37, but at that point why not 118 fields?
Without qualification, that's false. 17 is a simplified or compressed view of what the Standard Model describes. I gave more detail in this comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48700610
37 is what you get from counting Dirac matter fields (24) plus gauge fields (12) plus the Higgs. That's post-symmetry-breaking, and doesn't account for chirality.
If you count fundamental field components in the electroweak-symmetric Lagrangian, you get 43. I broke down both of those numbers in my comment linked above.
> If you pick and choose which properties to select as unique fields, maybe you can get the number 37, but at that point why not 118 fields?
There's no picking and choosing involved - quite the opposite. It's counting what the QFT math specifies. Particles with e.g. different color charges can't share the same field. To get to 17 from either of the above, you have to ignore quark color charges and the different gluon types. It's essentially a classification of types of particles that combines field together, it's not a count of fields.
"Field" is being used there in its general sense, of a quantity that has a value for every point in space and time. It's saying that in a (region of a) quantum field that contains no activity, there are nevertheless random fluctuations, which can themselves be modeled as a field. But they're not separate from the quantum field that gives rise to them - they have all the same fundamental properties.
Other fields can be seen as attributes of the space itself, and "elementary particles" as wrinkles on it. Gravity is special because it bends the very geometry of space.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon
It's important to remember that this is not true in QFT, and QFT is not true in GR. That is, the math of QFT does not work if spacetime can become curved (at least, if it can become significantly curved).
We should also remember the enormous cosmological curvature in which testable quantum systems exist; it's not just about compact objects. Significant? There's observed H-sources above z ~ 15, and of course the CMB photons at z ~ 1100. Indeed, B&D deals with Robertson-Walker spacetimes over several chapters before they get to black holes.
Also at the weak but measurable curvature regime there's e.g. Pound-Rebka, time metrology[1], and so forth, and lots of spacecraft confirming the strong equivalence principle (e.g. MESSENGER, LAGEOS) and thus supporting the LLI one expects to find in relativistic QFTs of the sort one would use to describe the behaviour of laser altimeters, distant astrophysical masers (and the Lyman-alpha forest), the spectral lines in stellar atmospheres and so on.
[1] just because it's neat and directly relevant to your comment: https://journals.aps.org/prxquantum/abstract/10.1103/q188-b1... [2025]
Definitely. It's rather strange that the OP article doesn't even mention the word "field". It seems that people in general have a hard time letting go of the idea of particles as fundamental.
A good overview of this is "There are no particles, there are only fields" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.4616) by physics prof Art Hobson.
Fields collapse the zoo described in the article significantly, because particles and antiparticles arise from the same field, and similarly, spin, polarization, and helicity are properties of the same field. Taking this into account, the 118 particles number that the article reaches at one point drops to 37 fields.
Anyway: Would you list them? Or supply a link to somewhere that does?
Here's how the list of 37 typically breaks down:
18 quark fields: 6 flavors x 3 colors
3 charged leptons: electron, muon, tau
3 neutral leptons: neutrinos corresponding to the charged leptons
12 gauge bosons: 1 photon, 3 electroweak bosons (Z, W+, W-), 8 gluons
1 Higgs boson
(Note: this refers to fields as we observe them today, essentially counting what are known as Dirac fields. These are not the more fundamental fields that were present before the electromagnetic force separated from the weak nuclear force in the early universe, a process known as electroweak symmetry breaking. More on this below.)
In writing that list out, I realized that it skips one of the properties the article mentioned: chirality. If we take that into account, the number of charged lepton fields doubles to 6, and we have 40 fundamental quantum fields.
The reason that distinction is often ignored is that at everyday energies, the left- and right-handed components of particles are essentially blended together, so experiments don’t see them as separate particle types. Treating left- and right-handed chirality as a single field is a simplification of the underlying electroweak theory. Treating them as distinct particles, as the article does, is actually a bit dubious.
Re electroweak symmetry breaking, if we're really looking for "fundamental", then it makes sense to look at the fields before symmetry breaking. In a very real sense, these are more fundamental, because they give rise to the fields we observe.
But, that gets into fields that most non-physicists won't recognize, and that don't even have good names: the weak isospin gauge fields W^1_\mu,\; W^2_\mu,\; W^3_\mu,\; and the hypercharge field B_\mu.
In that scenario, there are 4 Higgs fields, which brings the total field count to 43. After symmetry breaking, those extra 3 Higgs fields became longitudinal polarization modes of the electroweak bosons, which are not counted as extra fields. The article mentions this, "the W+, W−, and Z bosons have a third, “longitudinal” polarization state as well," and adds them to its particle count.
We can relate this all back to the article as follows:
1. To count antiparticles, group the quarks and leptons into fermions - 18 + 3 + 3 = 24, and double that to count antiparticles, giving 48. Bosons are their own antiparticles, so their count doesn't change. The total particle count is now 48 fermions + 12 gauge bosons + 1 Higgs = 61.
2. For spin/polarization, double the number of fermions again to 96, double the number of gluons from to 16, multiply photons by 2, multiply the 3 electroweak bosons by 3 giving 9. This gives 96 fermions + 2 photons + 16 gluons + 9 electroweak bosons + 1 Higgs boson = 124 particles.
That 124 is 6 more than the 118 mentioned in the article, but again it depends on exactly what you're counting. Chirality in particular complicates things, because of the blending issue I mentioned earlier.
72 quarks: 6 flavors x 3 colors x 2 (particle/antiparticle) x 2 (spin up/down)
12 charged leptons: 3 flavors x 2 (particle/antiparticle) x 2 (spin up/down)
6 neutrinos: 3 flavors x 2 (particle/antiparticle)
2 photons: 1 photon field x 2 polarizations
16 gluons: 8 types x 2 polarizations
9 electroweak bosons: 3 types (Z0, W+, W-) x 3 polarizations
1 Higgs boson
That totals 118. Here's a summary of how those come from the 37 fields I listed:
4 x 18 quarks
4 x 3 charged leptons
2 x 3 neutrinos
2 x 1 photons
3 x 3 electroweak bosons
2 x 8 gluons
1 x Higgs boson
"No idea, bro!"
It's one of the biggest open questions about the Standard Model, and it's considered an indication that the model is probably incomplete.
Btw you mentioned "weightier generations", but mass is a consequence of the difference between the generations, not the fundamental difference. Before electroweak symmetry breaking, those particles had no mass, but they already existed as three distinct generations, with different Yukawa couplings. When the Higgs field acquired a vacuum expectation value, those different couplings became different masses.
The Standard Model treats the number of generations and the Yukawa couplings as fundamental inputs to the theory. There's a Nobel Prize waiting for whoever figures out whatever might be behind this.
Even string theory doesn't solve this. Calabi-Yau manifolds provide a model which could explain it in theory, but no actual, concrete solution has been found.
It seems there has to be a reason WHY there are exactly N fields, and WHY they interact in the ways they do.
Edit: As I noted in another comment, the best explanation may come down to "there are only 100 viable types of universe, and ours is type 42". I'd be happy with that.
So, there is no way to start from mathematics and find something that must exist in some way, such as "there can only be 100 types of universe". Any such discovery is contingent upon some arbitrary choice of axioms. You can choose axioms that appeal to some ultimately esthetic sense of elegance or simplicity, and that can explain our universe more or less uniquely, but this doesn't mean that they are right to any extent more than the SM is.
Similarly, "Maybe the N fields are just vibrational modes or attractor dynamics of something simpler" could also be true - Calibi-Yau manifolds in string theory are essentially one such attempt to unify the similar and repetitive aspects of QFT that currently have no theoretically-justified connection in the theory.
Sure, at some level you presumably hit a wall - e.g. "why are there Calabi Yau manifolds?" But I don't think that's what the GP was referring to.
> Any such discovery is contingent upon some arbitrary choice of axioms.
This is true, but we see some wonderful examples of this in the real universe, producing laws that must be true in all universes that satisfy the axioms (assuming we believe that mathematical proofs aren't somehow tied to our universe.)
For example, Noether's theorem tells us mathematically when and why conservation laws, like conservation of energy and momentum, exist (i.e., for any continuous symmetry of the action of a physical system with conservative forces.)
Similarly, the inverse square law applies to anything that propagates, with no losses, outwards from a point in all directions in locally flat three-dimensional space. Again, we expect this to be true in any universe with these properties.
There are quite a number of other examples of this.
It's inductive and abductive reasoning. The one field, and it has lot of mathematical characteristics which makes it unique on its own, and also it is the only one that has a chance to fit, is the e8 field popularized by Garrett Lisi.
If a universe were to be designed based using the e8 Lie algebra as an elemental field, it would look a lot like our universe.
Currently the standard model is a patchwork of field added as experiments for observing particles were possible to realize. The big picture's view is a unified theory which fits perfectly all existing data.
Currently, we don't have any theory that works that's any simpler than the SM. So that's the theory that Occam's razor currently tells us must be true, as it's the simplest alternative that actually works.
I'd also observe that between dark matter and dark energy, there's good reason to believe that we may not have a full accounting of all fields.
I am just observing that if you have a non-scientist asking the question "how many fundamental particles are there", with the expectation that "995.5" is not really the right answer, "the number of fields" is a reasonable response that probably gets closer to what they are looking for. Even if someday someone does get them to all be some manifestations of a single field it would arguably still be the case that people are more interested in the answer of the current number of fields then being told "1", because "1" is in many ways not a helpful answer to "how many types of things are there". Even if there is a profound sense in which it was true, there would still be a profound sense in which it was false, too.
Even that has a (still unsatisfactory) answer.
Poincaré symmetry imposes constraints on the kinds of fields we can have. Gauge symmetry shows us how they may couple.
There are still some arbitrary selections of the possible permutations that nature has “picked”.
It would be much more satisfying (not that nature exists to be satisfying) if we could explain our universe starting from some universal constraints on things that must be true of any non-random mechanistic universe, plus some set of (< N) non-forced "it must be A or B" additional constraints, then be able to derive everything known about our universe - fields and symmetries etc - (& ideally predict something unknown) as resulting from some particular selection of those additional constraints.
This seems about as close as we could get to explaining our universe... Basically saying that god flipped a coin marked A and B, and it come down A so here we are. Maybe god kept on flipping sets of coins and created a whole bunch of other universes too, whose physics we could also derive.... and maybe one day visit and confirm.
If you look at histogram plots of protons, neutrons, and stability, it's not a perfectly idealized form. It's a rocky plot. This emerges from the quantized nature of reality.
So a periodic table of particles (fields) that looks kind of weird and ad-hoc to us is the expected result.
What we don't yet fully understand is really two things as far as I know. First, we know less about why these particular values are special. For the periodic table we actually understand this pretty well. Second, we do not know if there are other islands of stability or particles-fields we cannot see (e.g. WIMPS). For the periodic table we are pretty sure there are no large islands of stability at higher weights. Not 100% sure, but if they do exist there's probably only a few exotic mega-atoms that could be stable, not many.
That being said, is difficult because we are using language to describe very-much-not-everyday stuff. We all need mental hooks to anchor new knowledge and most of our intuition is based on the classical (not-quantum) world aroud us.
That said, I get it is difficult, especially because we are using everyday language to talk about very-much-not-everyday stuff. We all needental hooks to anchor new knowledge and most of our intuition comes from the classical (not-quantum) world around us.
As a physicist, I feel the art is in learning when to use what description, what Sean Carrol calls "poetic naturalism".
Someone else already mentioned that yes, they're manifestations of quantum fields. This is well established - the dominant theory of particle physics, the Standard Model, is a theory of quantum fields.
In that context, a particle is simply the smallest excitation of a quantum field that can be detected. Fields can be "excited" (fluctuate) in many different ways, and the OP article is interpreting each one of those as a different type of particle. It's misleading.
Yes, theorists have been working on a similar idea for decades.
> the “wave photon” and the “particle photon” seemed like possibly different things?
No. Wave vs particle is just a different description of the same thing.
The Everything-Is-a-Quantum-Wave Interpretation of Quantum Physics
https://www.mdpi.com/2624-960X/5/2/31
I feel like you're alluding to something but won't say to what? Maybe something like the 'fine-tuned universe' hypothesis?
IMHO, I like to count the x3 colors of quarks and the x2 chirality of bosons. So I get 16*3 fermions and 1+8?+3?+1 bosons, in total 61 but the number of bosons is not a hill I will do die on.
On the other extreme, there are some proposal to reduce the number of particles, in particular it makes a lot of sense to consider the electron and neutrino as a single class of particle, and the up and down quark as a single class of particle, so I guess the number goes down to 6 fermions + 4 bosons = 10? in total (I'd keep chirality, so perhaps 12+4=16?).
And there are even more extreme proposals to consider quarks and leptons in a single bag of mud. In particular this was popular like twenty years ago, but the experiments disagree (IIRC by a small amount, IIRC it's not a very bad approximation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi%E2%80%93Glashow_model I tried to count the particles there and I gave up, let's say a lot.
And you still have to add gravitons (and their weird cousin particles) and perhaps more than one Higgs bosons. So the number should increase in the future.
And there are still ideas to add a global x2, because it would be nice if every bososn has an undiscovered fermion companion and vice versa. IIRC it's falling out of fashion because the simple versions don't agree with the experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry but it sounds interesting :(
---
In conclusion: Don't get too attached to the number 17.
[1] Actually the photons and the gluons have mass=0, but nobody would confuse them. So, let's count them as different particles. (If it exist, the graviton also has mass=0 too.)
[2] There is something weird with the W and Z particles, Hardcore particle physicist may claim they are the same particle and give a two hour talk about the apparent difference of mass.
[3] There is something weird with the mass of neutrinos. Don't ask unless you really love linear algebra.
[4] There may be details that I'm hiding on purpouse.
[5] There are details that I forgot. I studied this a long time ago.
[6] There are details that I never learned, perhaps more than what I expect.
[7] Unknown unknowns.
I actually made mistake. There are 16 fields:
* 12 matter fields (6 quarks + 6 leptons)
* 1 gluon field (an 8-component SU(3) field)
* 1 weak field (a 3-component SU(2) field)
* 1 hypercharge field (a 1-component U(1) field)
* 1 Higgs field (SU(2) x U(1))
We have 17 particles is because W+, W-, Z are combination on 2 fields.
I think counting particles is just going to confuse people because they are really not “balls”.
think like the intensity of a RGB pixel - R can be 1, or maybe 10 for a particular pixel, thus you have 10 red "packets"
W and Z bosons, photons, etc have fixed masses, charges, interaction strengths with other particles. These properties can exactly be listed and looked up in a table of elementary particles with discrete rows.
Gluon color is continuous property in a vector space. Gluons can have any color in that space, with any combination of the 8 basis vectors (and that choice of basis is also completely arbitrary). The color |g1> is no more valid than the color (|g1> + |g2> + |g8> / √3) or any other of infinite combinations.
Calling this "8 gluons" is like saying there's "3 photons" because they can have momentum in 3 dimensions. If you want to argue there's infinite kinds of gluons, go ahead, but there aren't 8.
But you can form a continuous set of linear combinations of these things, just as you can with gluons. Indeed, what the article calls W and Z bosons (and photons) are just such linear combinations--the ones that appear in the low energy limit after the electroweak phase transition occurs. Before that phase transition, different linear combinations (i.e., a different basis of the electroweak vector space) are the ones that naturally appear. So saying that there are two W, one Z, and one photon is really counting basis vectors in the electroweak vector space, just as saying there are 8 gluons is really counting basis vectors in the gluon sector of the strong interaction vector space.
In our own universe, the fact that electroweak symmetry breaks ensures there are 4 electroweak particles and not other combinations. There's no corresponding thing to contain gluons to individual particles, you'd need laws of physics we don't have to add that constraint.
No, it wouldn't. There would still be four; they would just be called W1, W2, W3, and B. The electroweak vector space doesn't change when the electroweak symmetry is broken; it has 4 basis vectors before, and 4 basis vectors after. All that changes is which basis is the most "natural" to use in describing physics at the given energy scale.
(And there would still be eight gluons as well--what I say below about those applies just as well above the electroweak symmetry breaking energy scale as below.)
> There's no corresponding thing to contain gluons to individual particles
If you mean that there is no "natural" choice of basis for the gluon vector space, that's not quite true either. The Gell-Mann matrices are a natural choice of basis for the adjoint representation of SU(3) (or, equivalently, the defining representation of the Lie Algebra of SU(3)), which is the gluon representation. Those eight matrices are what physicists typically are referring to when they refer to the eight gluons.
All of these are continuous properties in an n-dimensional vector space.
- fermions (charges) are in the fundamental representation of the gauge group, here SU(3) so 3 Colors
- bosons are in the adjoint représentation, for SU(3) that 8 dimensions
1. The left-handed lepton doublet field, and the antimatter equivalent. 2. The left-handed quark doublet field, and the antimatter equivalent. 3. The right-handed electron singlet field, and the antimatter equivalent. 4. The right-handed up-quark singlet field, and the antimatter equivalent. 5. The right-handed down-quark singlet field, and the antimatter equivalent.
The bosons are more confusing to me, but I think a reasonable person might say that there are 16 fundamental boson fields:
1. The four scalar boson fields. 2. The eight gluon fields. 3. The three W boson fields. 4. The B boson field.
The B boson couples to every fermion (via hypercharge), while gluons only couple to quarks (via color) and W bosons only couple to the doublets (via weak isospin).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preon
Is that a useful line to draw?
Not a physicist. Never played one on TV.
The article claimed exactly that! It said, "Not everyone counts these different chiral and polarization states as distinct particle types. Yet it’s logical to do so, because they affect how particles behave and interact."
At one point the author reaches a particle count of 118. This corresponds to the degrees of freedom of the on-shell physical states (polarizations, spin orientations, colors, and antimatter) of all particles in the Standard Model. As you say, it's misleading to call this a count of different particles.