The Tyranny of the ±1: How a Topological Constraint Became the Iron Law of Nature

Background This essay argues that the boson/fermion dichotomy of quantum statistics is not a law of thought but a topological constraint of living in at least three macroscopic spatial dimensions. The exchange phase of two identical particles is ±1 in any space of dimension three or more; only in two dimensions does the braid group allow the continuous anyonic phases of the fractional quantum Hall effect. Content The essay is the popular companion to the author's research paper, The Boson/Fermion Distinction: Spin-Statistics as Structural Invariant (doi:10.5281/zenodo.21938971). It walks the non-specialist through the configuration-space argument (Leinaas-Myrheim), the existence of anyons (Wilczek; Nakamura et al. 2020; Kundu et al. 2023), the Z2 structure of rotation groups in all dimensions d>=3, and the anthropic account of why we observe three large spatial dimensions. Usage Notes The full text is provided as a single Markdown file. Inline citations and a reference list are included; all references were verified against Crossref on 2026-08-14.