- Author
- Natalie Wolchover, columnist, Quanta Magazine
- Published
- 15 June 2026
- Kind
- Magazine column (Qualia essay) built on interviews with physicists
- Original
- www.quantamagazine.org/how-many-elementary-particles-are-there-really-20260615/
- Subject
- Science and medicine
- Themes
- Saying it exactly
What it is
Natalie Wolchover writes a column for Quanta Magazine. The author asks how many kinds of elementary particles exist. The author emailed physicists for their own tallies. The essay steps through each way of counting.
What it says
- Wolchover reports a poster count of 17: 12 matter, four force, one Higgs.
- The essay says antiparticles raise the total to 30 and eight gluons to 37.
- Counting quark colors gives 61, and chirality and polarization states give 118.
- Franklin says 17 is right and leaves out antiparticles. Quigg counts handedness but omits force carriers.
- The essay says degrees of freedom change with the scale you count at.
- A 2011 proof allows 1, 5.5 and 62 degrees of freedom per field type.
- Komargodski's tally for the Standard Model comes to 995.5 degrees of freedom.
What evidence it gives
The essay offers interviews with David Tong, Melissa Franklin, Chris Quigg and Zohar Komargodski. It gives the arithmetic for each count. The 2011 proof is described, not reproduced.
Interests and limits
This is a column. The author describes being a maximalist about the count. Only a few physicists were consulted. The counts reflect conventions, not measurements. The proof behind 995.5 is summarised in words only.