Elementary particles and randomness

In summary: Physics (and science in general) is about creating a model which describes observations. Concepts such as energy, particles, and waves are introduced because they provide a good description of what we can observe. If you want to say that these concepts are "real" in any sense of the word, you are leaning more to the philosophical than to the physical side of things.
  • #36
Brunolem33 said:
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The thing is then that you say that the particle content should be randomly chosen (why would that make any sense?). However I am saying that you had a fixed number of particles: the ones we know and Dark Matter, and those were produced at some point... Now the total number of different particles is unknown I guess, and it depends on the model you choose as a higher energy than the standard model theory. For example in SUSY you have at least double particle types... for an SU(2)xSU(2) breaking to the SM one you have additional gauge bosons: Wprimes and Zprime etc...
 
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  • #37
@Brunolem33: You got the time ordering wrong. Those particles are not created by a plasma, the are making up the plasma.
In the molten lego analogy: all that molten lego is made out of protons, neutrons and electrons. Cooling it can give various pieces of different shape, but those pieces are all not elementary particles.

In more physical terms, our universe is described as spacetime with various fields in it. The electromagnetic field is one, but there is also an "electron/positron field", a "muon/antimuon field" and so on. One field for one particle type (ignoring some technical details here). The number of fields is fixed, we live in a universe with a specific set of those. We found some of them. We probably did not find all (because dark matter is still a mystery and a few other questions are still open), but there is no indication that we would have missed millions of them.
 

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