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

This is the most important distinction in the standard model and underpins kind of most of the rest of what we're going to be talking about.

So a fermion is a particle that has half integer spin.

So spin half.

Again, technically it can be like spin three three over two or five over two.

as well, but I I'll just say spin half for simplicity 'cause the fundamental particles all have spin half.

Uh so we know that electrons have spin half and so they are fermions.

Quarks also have spin halves, so quarks are also fermions, and as it turns out, so do neutrinos, so they are spin half.

So fermions are not just fundamental particles, there are composite particles that are fermions as well.

We're just going to be talking about fundamental fermions, and so some of the things that I say will only apply to that.

We talked about spin before.

Spin essentially describes an intrinsic angular momentum.

So we can imagine like every particle is a tiny top.

That's spinning about its central axis.

And the angular momentum that it has as a result of that is described by spin.

Spin half actually refers to a wave that has to undergo two full oscillations to return to the same state.

So normally if you think about rotating an object, if you rotate it 360 degrees, it'll be back to the same orientation.

But that's not necessarily true for uh arbitrary objects.

And the there are objects uh such as a standing wave on a Mobius strip.

A Mobius strip is like you you cut a piece of paper and then you sort of rotate it about a bend and then glue the two ends together, and you've got a piece of paper that only has one side.

If you're not familiar with

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