ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of what modern physicists think of as the elementary quanta, the ultimate components of the physical world. There is some ambiguity as to which elementary quanta can be colloquially considered “building blocks” of matter or of energy or of some hybrid between the two. Elementary quanta can be classified into two distinct groups called fermions and bosons, based on the symmetry properties they exhibit. Fermions obey rules referred to as Fermi–Dirac statistics, for which the Pauli exclusion principle is a fundamental premise. The appearance of neutrinos, however, met with a very different response. Wolfgang Pauli suggested the neutrino as a particle with no electric charge and almost zeros mass in order to address a long-standing problem associated with an “energy crisis” in nuclear beta decays. Pauli’s proposed neutrino would be participating in the beta decay process, unobserved by experimental detectors.
