How many fundamental particles are there?
So far, we know of 16 elementary or fundamental particles – and they have wonderful names.
There are 12 fermions: quarks — up, down, strange, charm, bottom, top; and leptons — electron, muon, tau, electron neutrino, muon neutrino, tau neutrino. Then there are 4 gauge bosons – gluon, W and Z bosons, photon.
But there might be more fundamental particles and there is particular speculation over the existence of something called the Higgs boson particle (sometimes known as the God particle).
In 2007, there may be new discoveries as a result of the coming into operation of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland.