In the three-dimensional world we live in, there are only two types of particles: "fermions," which repel each other, and "bosons," which like to stick together. A commonly known fermion is the electron, which transports electricity; and a commonly known boson is the photon, which carries light. In the two-dimensional world, however, there is another type of particle, the anyon, which doesn't behave like either a fermion or a boson.
In a two-dimensional world, two identical anyons change their wavefunction when they swap places in ways that can't happen in three-dimensional physics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AnyonAfter decades of exploration in nature’s smallest domains, physicists have finally found evidence that anyons exist. First predicted by theorists in the early 1980s, these particle-like objects only arise in realms confined to two dimensions, and then only under certain circumstances — like at temperatures near absolute zero and in the presence of a strong magnetic field.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/physicists-prove-anyons-exist-a-third-type-of-particle-in-the-universeI won't even pretend that this stuff isn't waaay over my head - the concept of a 2D particle in 3D space is mindbending enough by itself - but regardless, the practical application is that these particles may be useful in quantum computers, allowing these computers to encode data more efficiently.
Also, I'm amazed at the sheer variety of subatomic stuff going on invisibly around us. The ancient greeks hypothesized indivisible atoms, but we've dug so much further down than that, into electrons and protons and neutrons, and then further down into ferminions (quarks, leptons, antiquarks, antileptons), gauge bosons (aka force carriers - photons, W and Z bosons, gluons) and Higgs bosons. Add to that quasiparticles - emergent properties of particles, kind of like flocks of birds. (I hope I got that basically correct, even this short summary was taxing!)
And boy are there a lot of them. We dig and dig and we just go down and down, seemingly forever...
My question is, how far can we dig until we hit bedrock? Surely we can't keep discovering new subatomic particles forever - like some infinite russian doll. Surely, there have to be the fundamental building blocks of reality somewhere down there. And just how much of this stuff actually exists in reality and how much are convenient mathematical abstractions?
