How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
Plausible answers range from 17 to — in all seriousness — 995.5.
Plausible answers range from 17 to — in all seriousness — 995.5. How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really? | Quanta Magazine Home How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
The short version
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- By Natalie Wolchover June 15, 2026 Plausible answers range from 17 to — in all seriousness — 995.5.
- How many kinds of elementary particles should I say there are?
What the source reports
In experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, physicists smash together beams of protons, breaking them up into all possible elementary bits and pieces. Meanwhile, they have an incredibly accurate set of mathematical equations for describing these building blocks and all the ways they fit together. So, since the known particles of nature can be both empirically observed and theoretically described, you would think they could also be counted.
Why it matters
I knew that, for reasons we’ll see, the census is not so easy as it seems.
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