> 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