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.
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?
> 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.
Yes, probably would not turn out well. Will put it on my bucket list next to "visit black hole event horizon".
I completely agree that's a reasonable question.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
To me that raises the opposite question, why are there so few fields? (Compared to what I'd imagine, infinite)
[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]
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.
In QFT every particle type has its own field.
...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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon
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.
Where are you getting 37? The standard model has 17 fields.
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?
> The standard model has 17 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.
> They're manifestations of fields.
Or wave. Everything is a quantum wave.
https://www.vlatkovedral.com/everything-in-the-universe-is-a...
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.
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, the field is the substrate.
"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.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_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.”
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.
> 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".
A wave is a phenomenon that propagates through a field - i.e. the field is what allows the wave to exist.
(The philosophy of that admittedly gets messy, though, e.g. "are fields real objects?")
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.
> 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
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.
Here's a more exact breakdown of the 118 particle number from the article:
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
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