How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?

warumdarum

Some powerof two many actual states + a fractal deterministic random generator for particle Explorers?

EwanG

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).

BobbyTables2

Not being a Physicist, I have to wonder if all these particles are somehow manifestations of a simpler thing. Might there have been a point in time (long ago) where the “wave photon” and the “particle photon” seemed like possibly different things?

Noaidi

There are no particles. Everything is a wave. The Everything-Is-a-Quantum-Wave Interpretation of Quantum Physics https://www.mdpi.com/2624-960X/5/2/31

d4ng

There are also 17 wallpaper groups. That always seemed like a funny number. I know it's a long shot, but is there a relation?

unholiness

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.

calimoro78

The answer is 42.

Alulim

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).

mac3n

going in the opposite direction, as few as two https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preon

ziofill

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).

Sniffnoy

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?

Razengan

Are there ANY, at all?

anthk

I wish the Torstone particle from Pinĉak was validated.

brap

I sometimes wonder if at some point we’ll discover that the fundamental laws of the universe are simply far beyond anything we can even remotely comprehend, like explaining a microprocessor to bacteria. But then what if we end up with ASI that can comprehend and make it useful for us?

lacoolj

I think it's less "how many are there" and more "how small can we go before the influence is too negligible to matter, or is too small to be affected by anything we could physically do or observe" I mean, there is definitely no "floor", nor "ceiling". Size infinitely gets smaller and infinitely gets larger. We are probably sitting on top of what super-gigantic humans of astronomic proportions would consider a lepton.

NoMoreNicksLeft

One. The question is, does this refer to types or count?

playorizaya

The Standard Model died for me when the Higgs failed to live up to the hype. I’ve long thought of CERN to be a scam of sorts - such physicists made great television in the 90s/00s but that’s all it ever was. Turns out nobody really knows, and the concept of reducing reality to a dozen or so balls is nothing short of a joke to anyone who knows how to think properly. Not only does coming up with this billiard ball theory fall WAY short of explaining the universe, it falls short of even being possible to explain it. For example you can’t get the answer to a real mystery like the energy preceding the Big Bang or what consciousness is from these balls. It’s a stupid idea.

duncangh

This and not being able to divide by 0 in math always drove me up the wall in school. Encountering a god level difficulty unsolved problem in the first 5 minutes of discussion around the basics of the field and then shrugging and continuing to build castles of complexity atop the seemingly rickety foundation irrationally irked me. Feels good to get that off my Chest. I’ve been holding it in for ~20 years