David Tong

Quanta lines up the counts: 17 in the textbook, 61 once you split quark colors and boson handedness, 995.5 if you count quantum degrees of freedom. David Tong's verdict: 'the true answer is not an integer.'

A physicist in the thread says the article breaks where it counts '8 gluons' as if they were discrete like the W and Z. Gluon color is a continuous space; the basis is arbitrary. Particles are just excitations of fields — count the fields, and the number collapses.