James Fodor

speaker

3,084 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Aug

James Fodor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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The Science of Everything Podcast · Episode 163: The Standard Model of Particle Physics · 8 Aug 2026 podcast

I'm your host, James Fodor.

So this episode we're going to talk about the different particles and their interactions that um uh exists for all of the other forces beyond just electromagnetism, which is what we discussed in the the previous episode in this series, quantum electrodynamics.

So this is an extension of that episode.

Particularly we're going to be talking about the weak and strong nuclear forces and how they can be described using the formalism of quantum field theory and

then we'll put everything together and talk about the

different categories of particles, leptons, quarks, fermions, bosons, and so forth.

So we'll discuss each of these particles, how they relate to the three different fundamental forces, and how all of these different things are organized within the context of the standard model.

Recommended pre-listening, as I've indicated, is episodes 158 and 159 on quantum electrodynamics.

And those episodes in turn have a number of prerequisites.

So I'm going to be assuming that you know something about quantum field theory and quantum electrodynamics.

So if not, I recommend listening to those episodes in advance.

Although I won't go into quite as much detail about the formalism as we did in the quantum electrodynamics episode, but we will discuss things like the

Grangians, uh equations of motion and and things like that.

So um I I'm assuming some amount of familiarity with those.

So let's begin with a bit of introduction and historical background to understand this what the standard model is and how it relates to other theories in uh particle physics and quantum field theory.

So the standard model describes the interactions of of three of the four fundamental forces that exist in nature, describes electromagnetism and then the weak and strong nuclear forces, or just the weak and strong forces as they're often called.

The standard model does not describe the interactions of gravity.

So gravity is the fourth force, and that is described using general relativity, which I've discussed in a previous episode.

One of the major outstanding problems in physics is to integrate these theories of general relativity for gravity on one hand, and then the standard model for the other three forces on the other hand, and that is still very much an open problem.

So I'm not going to be talking

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