The Pleasure and Pain of Scientific Predictions
For many years, most physicists thought that all particles must be either bosons (a category that includes photons, the particles of light) or fermions (which includes protons and neutrons, located in an atom’s nucleus). But in the early 1980s, building on work by earlier researchers, I proposed the existence of a new type of particle, which I named anyons as a kind of joke, derived from “anything goes.” At the time, I expected the existence of anyons to be confirmed by observation within a few months—rather short of the four decades it actually took. In science, reality can be slow to meet our expectations.
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