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).
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 :(
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In conclusion: Don't get too attached to the number 17.
I feel like you're alluding to something but won't say to what? Maybe something like the 'fine-tuned universe' hypothesis?
If we live in a false vacuum, for example, that could allow them to decay.
However, we don't expect electrons to decay as we don't know what they would decay into i.e. there doesn't seem to be anything plausible with a lower energy configuration.
> If we live in a false vacuum, for example, that could allow them to decay.
Possibly, but that's quite speculative and if our vacuum does decay, then there's a good chance we wouldn't be around to see the differences.
Might there have been a point in time (long ago) where the “wave photon” and the “particle photon” seemed like possibly different things?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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?
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'."
Letter to John Lighton Synge (9 November 1959), as quoted by Walter Moore in Schrödinger: Life and Thought (1989) ISBN 0521437679
"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.
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.
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".
(The philosophy of that admittedly gets messy, though, e.g. "are fields real objects?")
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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"
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”.
The Everything-Is-a-Quantum-Wave Interpretation of Quantum Physics
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.
All of these are continuous properties in an n-dimensional vector space.