Obviously, Wheeler was much more knowledgeable about physics than the likes of me, so my obvious objection must have occurred to him, but here it is.
Electrons have mass, so the total mass of a multiple electrons must be more than the mass of a single electron. Or is there some other mind-bender that would explain why "the" single electron appears to have a trillion times it real mass when that electron's timeline happens to be considered at a particular slice of space and time?
Also, why wouldn't this logic also apply to every other primitive particle: there is only one muon, one tau, one up quark, one down quark, etc?
>>why wouldn't this logic also apply to every other primitive particle: there is only one muon, one tau, one up quark, one down quark, etc?
When Wheeler came up with his idea, antimatter had just been discovered and positrons were the only known form of it at the time. So he was trying to explain why electrons/positrons are so alike, and yet not alike. In other words, just a historical accident that he applied his idea solely to electrons.
But yes, as new antimatter particles were subsequently discovered, his idea could be applied to those as well. In fact, if you're a believer in string theory, one could imagine that there's one fundamental string particle that's moving back and forth through time, creating all the other particles as it does so.
> In fact, if you're a believer in string theory, one could imagine that there's one fundamental string particle that's moving back and forth through time, creating all the other particles as it does so.
The thing you should know is that in QFT, the concept of a particle is a bit different. A particle is a localized excitation of a quantum field. A quantum field is like a bucket of water, and a a particle is a bit like a propagating wave that you can create that travels "on the field" but it's "made of the field".
A mass of a particle tells you how hard you need to hit the field to create this elementary excitation. And this is where the analogy breaks, since a classical field doesn't have this "quantization" of energy, you can create arbitrarily small waves. Whereas in a quantum field, there's a minimum energy that you need to put to excite it and make an electron show up, and that is the mass. It also acts a bit like the (inverse) width of the wave - the higher the mass the smaller the width and thus the more spacially localized it is.
Technically the statement that all electrons are the same is the "correct" one, because technically there's only one "state of the electron field" which is described by a bunch of excitations here and there. So the total mass (or more precisely, the energy state that the field occupies) is actually a huge mess that happens to be easily factorizeable into a bunch of localized states. This is only possible because interactions are extremely weak and thus we can just "sum the electrons". But if all of a sudden the electron charge were to become massive, to the point where electrons would start interacting at much bigger distances, the concept of individual electrons would start to become complicated and we'd need to think about them in some other way (like what happens with quarks and gluons)
Time travel is required for this thought experiment. The single electron moves forwards and backwards in time so that at any slice of time it can appear at multiple locations simultaneously. Just like a time traveller can go back in time and there would be two of them, this electron travels back and forth in time so that there are numerous instances of it.
>Or is there some other mind-bender that would explain why "the" single electron appears to have a trillion times it real mass when that electron's timeline happens to be considered at a particular slice of space and time?
Wouldn't this be explained by the mass attraction of the electron alone in point A, vs the aggregate attraction of the electron creating a larger "cloud" by being at multiple points (to e.g. form a whole sun)?
As long as this "jumping from point to point" is immediate (or much faster than the speed of transmition of gravity attraction due to mass), that would appear as a much higher mass, no?
If you can go forward and backward in time, you can make your mass appear in multiple places. Your 75 kg (or whatever you are) can appear in NY Times Square, simultaneously with an appearance in Champs-Élysées.
If it jumps across the universe uniformly then with each jump it can pull its surroundings as if there would be many electrons. Kind of like a single cpu core can run many programs "in parallel".
The conventional answer is that all electrons are the same because they are all local excited states of a single quantized field (the electron field). So we just have to shift perspective from "there's only one electron" to "there's only one electron field".
No, it’s a legitimate answer to why all electrons have the same properties. This is the real answer according to our best modern theories of particle physics. It explains why all elementary particles appear to have fixed sets of properties.
Maybe I don't follow the consequence of your statement, but isn't the photon quite different from an electron? It has no mass & has no anti particle that we can identify. It's also an elementary particle that doesn't get combined like quarks to make the proton
No it's more like saying it's all just different regions of a single function. Individual electrons are just regions of that function that have particular recurring kinds of structure to them
And that idea is wrong. It was never accepted, not even by Feynman. The field explanation is the one used by the Standard Model. I’m providing the best known real answer for anyone curious after reading the article.
It's the usual map / territory or model / reality difference. If you've ever heard or said the Box-ism "All models are wrong, but some are useful" you've been introduced.
Some practice with it may even be a good intro to some veins of actual postmodernism (as opposed to piñata postmodernism which is mostly stuffed with straw by people who like hitting it).
This has nothing to do with postmodern philosophy. There is a difference between the reality, and a human's conceptualization of that reality. In fact, we can abstract further and say that there is a difference between X and the concept of X. Now, the GP comment is saying that the model of X (which is how a human being conceptualizes X) is different than X. So, when you look at nature as it is, there are no electrons. There are just things that humans happen to model as electrons. We could also happen to model them as something else perhaps inconceivable to us at the moment. But the reality of what-we-call-electron is independent from the concept of electron. This insight is as old as Plato and Kant.
Constructive postmodernism would propose a competing constructive model. At the very least doubt should have justification, otherwise it's naive agnosticism.
but this claims that the concept-of-electron as a discrete entity which the what-we-call-electron only approximates at best.
But because concept-of-electron is unscientific (aka, it is not produced from a falsifiable hypothesis), you can claim anything from it, including that it exists and supercedes the what-we-call-electron.
That is true for all physics. We can only claim to build approximate models that have degrees of freedom that only make sense within the context of that model. In a sense, every object that you attach to a physical explanation has an inductive bias because of the mechanisms that you use to interpret the observations surrounding that object..
I can't help but point out the humor of one being hundreds of years old while the other thousands.
(But yeah, Mediterranean/Europe wasn't at its best in-between...)
Also, postmodern science concepts of relativity and various quantum weirdness not having had an impact on postmodern philosophy (with the incompleteness theorem straddling both) is quite a bold claim.
The reality of electron (presumably) is static but our model of electron can change given new data, new information. The reality of our solar system is the same but the way Newton modeled it in his head is different than the way Einstein modeled it in his head (which is ever so slightly different than how a contemporary physicist would model it in their head at the moment).
Electron is something humans created to describe reality in a way that's comprehensible to us and at the same time we can observe via experiments that it is an accurate descriptions in a way that we can measure. Asking whether electrons are something else that conceptualization doesn't make much sense.
Well, it does makes sense, and there has been research and experiments to see if it is something else (and, compared to early descriptions of an electron, it has been shown to be something else: QM, further subatomic particles and all that).
You can argue that this is because we measured better, but even for some of the things we can't measure, we still opt for specific explanations of how they "really are" over others, even if they describe the same phenomena and have the same measurement accuracy.
If anything what you say is just a particular philosophy of looking into what those models mean, not some definitive truth.
If there's a gap between theory and reality, then there's a more accurate theory. If you know this more accurate theory, you're going to have specific arguments for it.
I think it's too easy to get sidetracked with the science aspect and not pay enough attention to the language/philosophy aspect.
I have 2 olives in my martini glass right now. I can see, feel, smell, and even hear them if I throw them. So we say they are "real" and it makes perfect sense for 99.9999% of our lives. But "real" has a very specific meaning that we never think about.
Then consider subatomic particles. You can't feel or see them. But the theories that describe their behavior have gone undefeated for decades. But we'll never be able to see one, so does it exist?
2 more examples: does something exist after it passes the event horizon of a black hole?you can see it, frozen and red shifted. But you can't be guaranteed that if you crossed over that you could touch it. You might get spaghettified and die but there's no way to report this experience to anyone before the event horizon. there's effectively two separate realities.
Next, consider 2 identical marbles mixed up in a box. If you measure both of them before and after shaking, you could still tell them apart because at the macro level, nothing is perfectly identical. One marble will have more protons or defects or higher temperature, etc.
But now try that with 2 atoms or molecules in a box. If you shake it, and discard any measurements on the box like vibration, you absolutely can not tell them apart. They could have disappeared and regenerated for all we know.
My point is that "real" isn't the only concept that leans heavily on language. But also the concept of "same" and for the black hole, even seeing it isn't enough to establish proof that what you're seeing is real. Even though it's the gold standard we constantly rely on. (Not to mention that the very perception of "sight" itself is just subatomic particles hitting a detector! Which is then carried by an EM field to the brain. But I'll stop there).
I propose a new flat electron theory. They do in fact orbit the nuclei in a simple orbit. It's just that Maxwell's equations don't apply at those length scales. Electron tunneling is a conspiracy designed to hide the truth.
This is of course a sarcastic aside, but I have to admit even toying with the idea of throwing out observations you don't like feels really good. I see why for some unbinding their beliefs from the constraints of reality is so appealing.
Theories are attempted descriptions of reality for various purposes (usually prediction.) Don't confuse the map for the territory. Theories, like maps, are created by humans, reality, like territory, is apparently not.
Its more a reinterpretation than a different theory because all computations are still the same. There are no alternative predictions for any measurable quantities.
If there were really only one electron, somebody in the universe would have broken it by now. Or maybe there is a great filter prohibiting any intelligence capable of poking too hard.
That would also explain why there don’t seem to be many advanced species out there; maybe we can only be observing universes in which we’re among the first, because it is less likely that we’ll not-die in a universe where everybody is poking the electron and exploding everything.
Ah, but because it moves backwards and forwards in time, (the positrons are that same electron going backwards in time), even if it does get broken, you wouldn’t know.
Since the wave function of an electron is unbounded in space, can't the wave functions of all electrons in the universe be seen as one giant wave function?
sounds like something you'd hear someone say while passing the blunt.. not that it makes it less true, just, you know, it's so bizarre.. and extra bizarre that the guy with the blunt is kind of right
We don't need a cockamamie time travel theory like this to explain why electrons all share certain properties like mass.
The entities of which there is only one instance are the fundamental constants. There is only one speed of light in vacuum, one Planck's constant and so on.
The properties of the electron arise due to some behavior of the underlying electric field, governed by equations, which contain fundamental constants.
The equations and constants explain why identical phenomena occur in locations separated by time and space.
The existence and pervasiveness of the constants is a mystery, to be sure. But constants are not particles; we don't need to postulate that they travel forwards and backwards through time. They exist across time and space, to be sure.
Whenever I read
"It's estimated that there are around X ys in the observable universe."
How in the hell could you figure that out, when there are a lot of things
in physics and astronomy that we do not yet know how works, nor how they
are composed.
It is the ultimate "estimate how long it will take to implement this computer system based on this napkin drawing I made in 3 minutes ago".
The only problem with the argument against it based on baryonic asymmetry is that if you cut a knot in half and look at one half of it, there's an entire other half you aren't seeing.
With this in mind, this idea is particularly fun if paired with something like Neil Turok's CPT symmetric universe (i.e. the other side of the knot).
Maybe our known universe truly is a single electron behaving similar to scan lines on a TV at Planck scale in a higher dimension. Planck is the hz rate in this parable.
Switch the PDF display to single-page and find page 33.
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