Welcome to the Quanta Audio Edition.

In each of these bi-weekly episodes, we bring you a story direct from the Quanta website

about developments in basic science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

Every elementary particle falls into one of two categories.

Collectivist bosons account for the forces that move us,

well individualist fermions keep our atoms from collapsing.

So why are there exactly two types of particles?

That's next. Quantum Magazine is an editorially independent online publication supported by the Simon's Foundation

to enhance public understanding of science.

Beneath the richness of our world lies a pristine simplicity.

Everything is made of a set of just 17 fundamental particles.

Those particles may differ by mass or charge, but common only two basic types. Each is either a boson or a fermion. Physicist Paul Dirac coined both terms in a speech in 1945, naming the two

particle kingdoms after physicists who helped elucidate their properties, Sautandra Nott

Bose and Enrico Fermi. In 1924, Bose was working at the University of Dhaka, in what is known

today as Bangladesh. Earlier, around 1900, Max Planck had proposed a law for how much light of each color a hot object emits.

Plank's insight that this light comes in discrete packets, or quanta, set physicists on the path to quantum mechanics.

Bose found a stronger mathematical derivation of Planck's law.

He wrote to Albert Einstein, asking for help in

submitting the result to a German journal, and then collaborated with Einstein to flesh out the idea.

Bose and Einstein's math described a situation where multiple particles can be perfectly alike,

not just have the same charge, mass, and energy,

...