The answer is 42.
Now that would be wildly co-incidental and creepy :)
How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
91–100 of 160 posts
Re: How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, very messy and ultimately unknowable.
Sure. We can say the same thing about a "quantum wave", though.
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.
Re: How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
planck scale is the theoretical limit to disassembly.
If something cannot be reduced, does it exist as an entity?
Re: How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
#94Physicist 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…
When you say “inherent property” I think “immutable” as in “cannot be changed from one chirality/spin to another”.
Is that a useful line to draw?
Not a physicist. Never played one on TV.
Re: How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
#95Physicist 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…
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Re: How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. We can say the same thing about a "quantum wave", though.
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.
> There is no "quantum wave"
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.
Re: How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
#97I 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?
Re: How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ( This seems about as close as we could get to explaining our universe... Basically saying that god fli…
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.
Re: How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
#99I 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.
Re: How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the article explains, counting is very hard. 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 pa…
Very interesting. I imagine though that the 17 model is reasonably consistent. I wonder what parallels there are with other areas of mathematics.
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.
[7] Unknown unknowns.