5 ms·

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

by jerf 3mo ago

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.

Noaidi 3mo ago
> They're manifestations of fields. Or wave. Everything is a quantum wave. https://www.vlatkovedral.com/everything-in-the-universe-is-a-quantum-wave/ https://www.vlatkovedral.com/everything-in-the-universe-is-a...
- GroksBarnacles 3mo ago
  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.
  - Noaidi 3mo ago
    Yes, the field is the substrate. "I insist upon the view that 'all is waves'." Letter to John Lighton Synge (9 November 1959), as quoted by Walter Moore in Schrödinger: Life and Thought (1989) ISBN 0521437679 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.
    - dpark 3mo ago
      > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_wave
      - Noaidi 3mo ago
        > 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.
        tsimionescu 3mo ago
        > To measure is to quantize, so this is circular reasoning. This is a fundamental misunderstanding. Measurement (which is a precisely defined mathematical concept) is not the same thing as quantization. For a very basic example, in all known physics theories, including QFT, SR, and GR, space and time can be measured, and they are not quantized. In fact, there is no theory compatible with SR in which space and time can be quantized, given the nature of the Lorenz transform: SR predicts continuous length contraction from the PoV of observers moving at any velocity relative to each other; for any distance of length 1, some other observer can exist for which the length would be 1/x, with x as a real number.
  - dpark 3mo ago
    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.
- antonvs 3mo ago
  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?")
  - Noaidi 3mo ago
    Yes, very messy and ultimately unknowable.
    - antonvs 3mo ago
      Sure. We can say the same thing about a "quantum wave", though.
      - Noaidi 3mo ago
        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.
        antonvs 3mo ago
        > 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.
        Noaidi 3mo ago
        Yeah, I can see how it looks that way. I did not say everything is the quantum wave. I said everything is a wave, but the research paper i linked to uses the sloppy term Everything is a quantum wave. While I agree with the author I disagree with the title and terminology
        3mo ago
- andrewflnr 3mo ago
  > 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".
rwmj 3mo ago
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]
- Filligree 3mo ago
  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.
TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
In QFT every particle type has its own field.
- antonvs 3mo ago
  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.
  - dpark 3mo ago
    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?
    - antonvs 3mo ago
      > 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 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.
      - dpark 3mo ago
antonvs 3mo ago
> 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 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.
- AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
  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?
  - antonvs 3mo ago
    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.
HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago
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?
- tsimionescu 3mo ago
  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.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago
    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.
    - tsimionescu 3mo ago
      I think it's very obvious no such answer is even possible in principle. Mathematics has no limits, you can describe anything you like by picking some axioms. Do you want to make sense of the expression 1+1=3? I can find axioms in which this is true. So, there is no way to start from mathematics and find something that must exist in some way, such as "there can only be 100 types of universe". Any such discovery is contingent upon some arbitrary choice of axioms. You can choose axioms that appeal to some ultimately esthetic sense of elegance or simplicity, and that can explain our universe more or less uniquely, but this doesn't mean that they are right to any extent more than the SM is.
deleted 3mo ago
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taylodl 3mo ago
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by jerf 3mo ago

Noaidi 3mo ago

> They're manifestations of fields. Or wave. Everything is a quantum wave. https://www.vlatkovedral.com/everything-in-the-universe-is-a-quantum-wave/ https://www.vlatkovedral.com/everything-in-the-universe-is-a...

GroksBarnacles 3mo ago
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.
- Noaidi 3mo ago
  Yes, the field is the substrate. "I insist upon the view that 'all is waves'." Letter to John Lighton Synge (9 November 1959), as quoted by Walter Moore in Schrödinger: Life and Thought (1989) ISBN 0521437679 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.
  - dpark 3mo ago
    > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_wave
    - Noaidi 3mo ago
      > 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.
      - tsimionescu 3mo ago
        > To measure is to quantize, so this is circular reasoning. This is a fundamental misunderstanding. Measurement (which is a precisely defined mathematical concept) is not the same thing as quantization. For a very basic example, in all known physics theories, including QFT, SR, and GR, space and time can be measured, and they are not quantized. In fact, there is no theory compatible with SR in which space and time can be quantized, given the nature of the Lorenz transform: SR predicts continuous length contraction from the PoV of observers moving at any velocity relative to each other; for any distance of length 1, some other observer can exist for which the length would be 1/x, with x as a real number.
- dpark 3mo ago
  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.
antonvs 3mo ago
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?")
- Noaidi 3mo ago
  Yes, very messy and ultimately unknowable.
  - antonvs 3mo ago
    Sure. We can say the same thing about a "quantum wave", though.
    - Noaidi 3mo ago
      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.
      - antonvs 3mo ago
        > 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.
        Noaidi 3mo ago
        Yeah, I can see how it looks that way. I did not say everything is the quantum wave. I said everything is a wave, but the research paper i linked to uses the sloppy term Everything is a quantum wave. While I agree with the author I disagree with the title and terminology
        3mo ago
andrewflnr 3mo ago
> 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".

rwmj 3mo ago

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]

Filligree 3mo ago
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.

TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago

In QFT every particle type has its own field.

antonvs 3mo ago
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.
- dpark 3mo ago
  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?
  - antonvs 3mo ago
    > 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 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.
    - dpark 3mo ago

antonvs 3mo ago

> 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 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.

AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
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?
- antonvs 3mo ago
  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.

HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago

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?

tsimionescu 3mo ago
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.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago
  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.
  - tsimionescu 3mo ago
    I think it's very obvious no such answer is even possible in principle. Mathematics has no limits, you can describe anything you like by picking some axioms. Do you want to make sense of the expression 1+1=3? I can find axioms in which this is true. So, there is no way to start from mathematics and find something that must exist in some way, such as "there can only be 100 types of universe". Any such discovery is contingent upon some arbitrary choice of axioms. You can choose axioms that appeal to some ultimately esthetic sense of elegance or simplicity, and that can explain our universe more or less uniquely, but this doesn't mean that they are right to any extent more than the SM is.

deleted 3mo ago

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taylodl 3mo ago

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