How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?

whatshisface•2 minutes ago

This is like asking how many corners there are on a loaf of bread. It may help you to look at the loaf harder, which is good, but don't expect an answer!

BobbyTables2•40 minutes ago

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?

jerf•30 minutes ago

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.

rwmj•13 minutes ago

To me that raises the opposite question, why are there so few fields? (Compared to what I'd imagine, infinite)

Filligree•7 minutes ago

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 quad the dark sector actually is.

Noaidi•21 minutes ago

> They're manifestations of fields.

Or wave. Everything is a quantum wave.

https://www.vlatkovedral.com/everything-in-the-universe-is-a...

GroksBarnacles•7 minutes ago

A wave is already what we call a manifestation of a field, maybe I skimmed too quickly but I don't get the author's breakthrough point.

colejohnson66•37 minutes ago

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?

Noaidi•17 minutes ago

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.

GroksBarnacles•5 minutes ago

Do you have a meaningful quantitative explanation with some math we can start building tech on, or will that require some... experiments?

krapp•15 minutes ago

I'll be sure to inform all of the physicists that @Noaidi on Hacker News has solved physics and that they can go home.

EwanG•about 1 hour ago

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).

warumdarum•about 1 hour ago

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

Noaidi•29 minutes ago

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

How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?

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