James Fodor

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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

Look up Mobius strip and you'll see what I'm talking about.

If you if you imagine a standing wave, just a water wave or something similar that that was on a Mobius strip, that wave would actually have to go through two full oscillations to return to the same state because it goes around the Mobius strip once.

When it does that, it's actually pointing down.

If it starts pointing up, it goes around once and now it's pointing down.

It has to go around again to come back to being point up, to pointing up.

So that's one sort of loose way of thinking about.

About what's intrinsic spin is, uh, intrinsic angular momentum.

You if you imagine, and again, this is an by analogy, but if you imagine each fundamental particle as this tiny Mobius strip with uh on a standing uh a standing wave in kind of a Mobius strip arrangement, then spin half means that the standing wave has to go around two revolutions in order to return to the initial state.

Spin one would mean that it only has to go around one rotation to get back to the initial state.

Spin two would mean it only has to go around half a rotation to come back to the initial state, because it's sort of like symmetric on both sides.

So so different spins relate directly to sort of how many rotations you have to go around to get back to the initial state.

Now I'm not saying that fundamental particles literally are a standing wave on a Mobius strip.

I'm saying that they have the same properties in this instance as one, and that's a useful way to visualize what's happening.

But the point is that fermions all have spin half.

And that makes their physics and mathematics a bit more complicated, uh, as we talked about in the quantum electrodynamics episode, when we had to go from the Klein-Gordon equation, which describes spin zero particles, to the Dirac equation, which describes spin-half particles, and the mathematics becomes much more complicated because of the needed uh need to describe spin and how it transforms.

So all of the quarks and uh electron and neutrinos all have spin half.

So that's a bit about fermions.

Now I said that there's two types of particles, fermions and bosons.

Bosons are defined as particles that have integer spin.

And they in the case of the standard model, the the fundamental bosons, are mostly the these force mediating particles.

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