How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
6/23/202636 min
How many pieces are there in the Standard Model of particle physics? 17, 30, 37, 61, 118? Or is the true answer much larger — and not even an integer? It depends on your taste for complexity — and mystery. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir Patel and columnist Natalie Wolchover plummet down another rabbit hole, and this one goes down to the very building blocks of our reality. This topic was covered in a recent story for Quanta Magazine.
Each week on The Quanta Podcast, Quanta Magazine editor in chief Samir Patel speaks with the people behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
[gentle music] What if your discovery of a natural gene-editing mechanism launched a revolution?
Samir Patel· Host0:06
What if your abstract math proofs had unexpected connections to the real world?
Speaker 10:11
What if your Nobel Prize-winning work on the expanding universe was just the beginning of the story?
Samir Patel· Host0:17
And what if you joined us, Steve Strogatz- And Janna Levin- To learn about all of this and much more on one podcast?
Speaker 10:24
Listen to season five of Quanta Magazine's- The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday starting June 11th.
Samir Patel· Host0:33
[upbeat music] When the Large Hadron Collider was completed on the Franco-Swiss border in 2008, it had a couple of basic jobs. One was to start something, and another was to finish something. It was hoped that the giant instrument would start a new era of physics by revealing unknown particles and forces that would help explain some of the lingering mysteries of reality. It really hasn't done that just yet, but it was also expected to put the finishing touches on everything else with the discovery of what is called the Higgs boson, the last missing piece of a very successful piece of math and physics known as the Standard Model. It did that beautifully in 2012. The Standard Model explains just about everything we can observe and measure, with the exception of dark matter and dark energy and gravity, in terms