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Funny to who? The decimal system, for example, is a human invention.

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.

> I have to wonder if all these particles are somehow manifestations of a simpler thing

Yes, theorists have been working on a similar idea for decades.

> the “wave photon” and the “particle photon” seemed like possibly different things?

No. Wave vs particle is just a different description of the same thing.

That's what the various string theory proponents start from. There's "too many" different subatomic particles, so there surely must be something smaller that they're composed of?

Even if we use "wave photon" and "particle photon" alternatively, they are only convenient ways of talking about the behavior of the "photon field". The same way when we say "it is raining" we don't mean there is an "it" that "rains" we should try to avoid giving too much litteral meaning to these descriptions.

That said, I get it is difficult, especially because we are using everyday language to talk about very-much-not-everyday stuff. We all needental hooks to anchor new knowledge and most of our intuition comes from the classical (not-quantum) world around us.

As a physicist, I feel the art is in learning when to use what description, what Sean Carrol calls "poetic naturalism".

Even though "particle photon" and "wave photon" are used alternatively, they are just convenient ways of talking about the behavior of the same "photon field". The same way when we say "it is raining" we don't mean that there is a "it" that "rains", we should try avoid taking these descriptions too literally.

That being said, is difficult because we are using language to describe very-much-not-everyday stuff. We all need mental hooks to anchor new knowledge and most of our intuition is based on the classical (not-quantum) world aroud us.

Unified field theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_field_theory

> I have to wonder if all these particles are somehow manifestations of a simpler thing.

Someone else already mentioned that yes, they're manifestations of quantum fields. This is well established - the dominant theory of particle physics, the Standard Model, is a theory of quantum fields.

In that context, a particle is simply the smallest excitation of a quantum field that can be detected. Fields can be "excited" (fluctuate) in many different ways, and the OP article is interpreting each one of those as a different type of particle. It's misleading.

Isn't it just a thing that cannot be broken into / explained as a combination of more elementary things? ie. as far as we know an electron is an elementary particle because it can't be split into smaller components nor is there any evidence that it contains something smaller (unlike, say, an atom or a proton).

> W and Z bosons, photons, etc have fixed masses, charges, interaction strengths with other particles.

But you can form a continuous set of linear combinations of these things, just as you can with gluons. Indeed, what the article calls W and Z bosons (and photons) are just such linear combinations--the ones that appear in the low energy limit after the electroweak phase transition occurs. Before that phase transition, different linear combinations (i.e., a different basis of the electroweak vector space) are the ones that naturally appear. So saying that there are two W, one Z, and one photon is really counting basis vectors in the electroweak vector space, just as saying there are 8 gluons is really counting basis vectors in the gluon sector of the strong interaction vector space.

The gluon with color (|g1> + |g2> + |g8>) / √3 is just a superposition of the gluons with colors g1, g2 and g8, the same way you can make superpositions of any other particles. You are right that the choice of basis vectors is arbitrary, but that doesn't make it wrong to count the number of dimensions. It also doesn't make it fundamentally different than, say, polarizations of photons or even flavors of quarks. You can have superpositions of photon polarizations or quark flavors.

All of these are continuous properties in an n-dimensional vector space.

And the different charge W bosons are just the same particle, via time reversal symmetry.

8 color indices, why not call that 8 particles what is the point of commenting like you are better than the article when you so clearly show you are not in one sentence never speak on physics again please

Huh, I didn't even know we had sub-species ID of gluons now

Hmm if a particle is a quantized packet of a field, then if multiple quantizations are possible in a field, then it's possible for more particles than fields?