ABSTRACT
Mathematical physicists are motivated by the vision of Oneness. They are offended by the plurality of particles on the one hand and by the plurality of forces on the other. Recall that in the Standard Model of matter there are leptons and quarks and anti-leptons and anti-quarks. And there are the four interactions: the strong force that binds quarks, with its quantum the gluon; the weak force that is involved in radioactive decay, with its own quanta, the intermediate vector bosons; the electromagnetic force, with its quantum the photon; and, weakest of all, the gravitational force, with its guessed quantum the graviton. The particles of matter spin with an angular momentum equal to a half-integral of the fundamental unit h-(h/2), where h is Planck’s constant, and they can exist in the same dynamic state with a fellow particle only if that particle has the opposite spin. As a consequence of this exclusion principle, they obey the statistics analysed by Enrico Fermi and Paul Dirac, and they are known collectively as fermions. The quanta associated with the four forces are different – they have integral spin and do not obey the exclusion principle; their statistics is that of S. N. Bose and Albert Einstein, and they are called bosons.
