Ask Ethan: What’s the difference between a Fermion and a Boson?
If you think that spin-1/2 and spin-1 aren’t that different, the actual science may shock you.
“The layman always means, when he says “reality” that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality.” -Wolfgang Pauli
There are only two types of fundamental particle known in the entire Universe: fermions and bosons. Every particle — in addition to the normal properties you know like mass and electric charge — has an intrinsic amount of angular momentum to it, colloquially known as spin. Particles with spins that come in half-integer multiples (e.g., ±1/2, ±3/2, ±5/2, etc.) are known as fermions; particles with spins in integer multiples (e.g., 0, ±1, ±2, etc.) are bosons. There are no other types of particles, fundamental or composite, in the entire known Universe. But why does this matter? An anonymous reader asks:
Could you explain the difference between fermions and bosons? What differs from an integer spin and a half-integer spin?
At first glance, it might seem like categorizing particles by these properties is completely arbitrary.
