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

Now what are the differences between these three generations of fermions apart from the fact that they have weird names?

Well the main difference is lies in their mass.

So essentially the first generation, up and down quarks, electron, electron, neutrino have the lightest mass.

If you go to the second generation, Charm and Strange Quarks, Muon and Muon Neutrino, they have a h they all have a higher mass.

It's not like a strict multiple though, that there's no simple relationship between the masses of the first and second generations, or the second and the third, but they are all bigger in the second generation.

And then when you move to the third generation, top and bottom quarks, and then the town, the town of Neutrina, they all have the higher mass again.

Ordinary matter is made up pretty much entirely of up and down quarks and electrons, and then decays mediated by the electron neutrino.

The other two generations are, to my knowledge, not really found at all in ordinary matter because the particles are all unstable.

They have a very short half-life.

And so they're only really formed in rare um s interactions.

Like for example

Cosmic ray particles from outside of the solar system that hit the Earth's atmosphere have extremely high energy and result in scatterings that form these um higher generations of matter.

But they're unstable and so they quickly decay down into the first generation.

So we don't normally see these higher generations, you know, in ordinary matter.

And so for many purposes we can kind of ignore them.

However, when we're talking about the standard model, you can't ignore them because they actually form essential they play essential roles, which we'll get to later.

That's actually partly how they were discovered because it was sort of determined that we need these higher generations in order to uh account for certain behaviors.

But most certainly ordinary chemistry and and most physics that we're familiar with involves only the first generation.

Apart from the differences in half-life, like stability, and the differences in mass, otherwise the generations all have essentially the same properties.

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