I’m fascinated with all these subatomic particles I never even knew existed, and I don’t know what their purpose is, how they’re different from our typical atoms, and where they’re found. Like bosons, leptons, quarks etc.
In: Physics
Some of those are categories rather than specific particles. For instance, “fermions” are particles that obey Fermi-Dirac statistics and that includes protons, neutrons and electrons. (The other definition is they’re particles with noninteger spin, like one half, one and a half, two and a half, and so on.) The other category covers stuff like photons and…most of the bosons, maybe all of them. Bosons obey Bose-Einstein statistics instead, and have integer spin. They also split particles into baryons and leptons, which are categories that meant “high mass” and “low mass”*. So while there are certainly a lot of particles, the terminology can make it seem even worse than it is. 🙂
Some of these particles are said to “mediate” a force, which means they appear when a field is acting. Photons appear when you interact with an electromagnetic field, W+, W- and Z^0 bosons are manifestations of the weak force, Higgs bosons go with the Higgs field (please don’t ask me anything about that one), you get gluons with the strong force, and we figure there should be a gravity particle, the graviton, but we have yet to confirm that one.
* *Those categories have had their definitions tweaked since, I believe, and now we have baryon = made of three quarks, meson = made of two quarks, and lepton = not made of quarks. And if you’re made of one quark, you’re called a quark. :)*
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