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It is an interesting theory, for sure. Instead of countless 3-dimensional particles, you have a single (or very few) 4-dimensional objects. You can imagine it like a sheet of fabric that is our present, with everything above the sheet being the future, everything below the past. When you want to sew a thread (our electron) through the sheet, you need to pierce the fabric, but to do it again, you first need to piece it the other way, giving you a positron. You can create or destroy arbitrary many of these, but you need create or destroy one of each every time. More interestingly, it is exactly determined which two will annihilate each other, as the allegorical loop of thread gets pulled tighter and tighter until it gets pulled though the sheet. The universe would be deterministic.
I’m sure there’s a myriad of contradictions to modern QM and particle physics, but it’s fun to think about nonetheless
second, slightly different electron shows up
universe implodes or something
Na, we got those too. Muons, tauons and neutrinos. But the universe unfortunately hasn’t imploded, meaning I have to go to work and pay taxes and shit.
deleted by creator
One reason why that is probably not true is because there are less positrons but if it were true they should number the same as electrons, right?
But if electrons are moving along the same “time direction” as we are and positrons are moving in the opposite “direction” then wouldn’t we expect there to be less protons? As we can’t measure the protons that already “passed” us? And we would measure more electrons as a some/many/all of the existing electrons are traveling alongside us?
Wait, I’m lost. What does it have to do with the amount of protons?
Positrons are different from protons. Both have a positive charge, but a positron is an elementary particle of a similar mass as an electron. They are rather rare in nature which OP was noting. Protons are made of three elementary particles, much heavier than positrons, and are, I imagine, present in nature in about the same order of magnitude as electrons.
I think you may have put more thought into this than Feynman. But then he probably had someone waiting for him in bed…
I know! Horrible isn’t it? I just can’t help it, thinking about stuff is actually fun for me… so embarrassing!
It was more a joke about how Feynman had two great loves: physics and fucking. And probably fucking more than physics.
Ah I see ;) I also have two loves, but my gaming pc is too heavy to drag to bed…
positrons are just really far away
We are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.
Life is just a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather!
Sorry mate, Tom couldn’t make it, so here we have Bill.
Weather update: it’s raining rocks from outer space
When is it my turn with the electron?
It already is been again and soon now.
when will now be then?
Ask The Smiths.
You can have it as long as you don’t observe it.
don’t worry guys I’m keeping track of it it’s moving very fast but oh fuck sorry guys my bad
For fuck sake Pauli, stop trying to smush it in the palm of your hand!
No Peter, this isn’t an electron, this is the power of the sun
I see, charge is a class method and not an instance method. Well played universe creator.
Fuck I knew it was made with OOP
Shouldn’t be just electrons though - don’t all instances of any given type of subatomic particle have the same mass and charge?
This gives me real Egg vibes.
🏳️⚧️
So if I can destroy 1 electron I destroy every electron?
I mean…if energy can not be created nor destroyed, it kind of lends to this hypothesis… 🤔
E=mc2 is the equation for how much energy is created by destroying a given amount of mass.
No, E=mc2 demonstrates that mass and energy are one in the same. When converting mass to energy, nothing is being destroyed, merely changing state. As far as we are aware, the absolute destruction or removal of energy, and thereby matter, from the Universe is not possible.
Only in its future. Probably you’d have to find the electron precisely at the end of its timeline.
If you destroy it, that will be the end of its timeline
So I have to destroy 2 electrons to fuck over causality.
Careful, reality might just destroy you instead to avoid the paradox. I suspect that’s how it avoids all of the paradoxes if time travel is possible in a single timeline universe. And this idea isn’t compatible with the multiple timeline time travel idea (otherwise the electron will end up in a different timeline each time it jumps backwards).
How could you destroy 2, if there’s only one?
That’s why it would fuck over causality. If I destroyed 1 that could be the natural end of the electrons “life” of bouncing back and forth through time. I would need to destroy a 2nd which would then have to be the same electron from earlier in it’s timeline.
Ah, you’re viewing it as a timetravellers’ dilemma.
My view was more that we’re an observer in the lagrangian solution to the differential equation we call life. The electron, being a constant in the equation. Remove the electron, you alter the equation, therefore destroying known life.
To destroy every other quantum state of the single electron, wouldn’t you need to destroy it at its beginning state? The end state would be at/just after the heat death of the universe, so it wouldn’t really make any difference then.
The end state doesn’t have to be at the end of time if the electron can travel backwards in time. It can go to the end, head back towards the beginning, and get destroyed somewhere in between.
Strictly speaking it would have to get destroyed at some point, or at least have something stop it from going back and forth, otherwise the universe would be all electron.
You would need a positron to do that and all you might have done is reflect it backwards in time.
If you could “remove” it by placing it into another dimension, it might disprove the theory, but the causal domain might be larger then previous assumed.
This is one of those Math Theories that isn’t technically a Science Theory. We can make a mathematical model, but it’s untestable.
Let’s try it and find out!
What a boson.
To his credit, Wheeler did try to make a quantum leap. It just wasn’t coherent. If he had kept at it, I’m sure he would have had momentum.
This comment gave me spin
I’m glad you realized the gravity of the situation.
This thread indicates you might have a bit of a strange quark.
Still very charming, though.
All ups, no downs.
I’m out in left field trying to figure out what’s happening?
Nobody wants to covalent anymore.
Fine, I’ll do it myself
-ThelectronYou have to be bonded and that’s a whole bureaucratic mess.
Let him cook
Don’t most sub-atomic particles have the same charge and mass? Why just electrons?
A big part of quantum mechanics is the fact that matter can show wave-like behaviour, which sort of breaks a bunch of “rules” that we have from classical physics. This only is relevant if we’re looking at stuff at a teensy tiny scale.
Someone else has already mentioned that electrons are a fair bit smaller than protons and neutrons (around 1840 times smaller) and this means they tend to have a smaller momentum than protons or neutrons, which means they have a larger wavelength, which was easier to measure experimentally. That’s likely why electrons were a part of this theory, because they’re small enough that they’re sort of a perfect way to study the idea of things that are both particle and wave, but also neither. In 1940, quantum mechanics and particle physics were super rapidly moving fields, where our knowledge hadn’t congealed much yet. What was clear was that electrons get up to some absolute nonsense behaviour that broke our understanding of how the world worked.
I like the results of some of the worked examples here: https://www.chemteam.info/Electrons/deBroglie-Equation.html , especially the one where they work out what the wavelength of a baseball would be (because that too, could theoretically act like a wave, it would just have an impossibly small wavelength)
TL;DR: electrons are smaller than protons/neutrons Smaller = larger wavelength Larger wavelength = easier to make experiments to see wave-like behaviour from the particle Therefore electrons were useful in figuring out how the heck a particle can have a wavelength and act like a wave
I detect you therefore you’re no longer a wave.
I like the way one of my university textbooks frames the particle wave duality thing: “A single pure wave has a perfectly defined wavelength, and thus an exact energy, but has no position. […] [Whereas a classical particle] would have a perfectly defined position but no definable wavelength and thus an undefined energy” ([1][2])
I am currently in my bed. I have a lot to do today, but I’m not sure how much I will get done because I don’t know how much energy have. Thus I conclude you are right and that I am clearly a particle.
^([1]: Principles and Problems in Physical Chemistry for Biochemists, Price, Dwek, Radcliffe & Wormald, p282)
^([2]: I’m practicing being more diligent with citations, in hope that good habits will make it easier when referencing is actually important)
Makes sense, why should I keep waving when you can see me now.
The whole thing is an abstraction. The nucleus isn’t actually tiny ball shaped things mashed together, but rather cloudy stuff which would probably not be identical if we could actually see them. The quarks that make up protons and neutrons are considered elementary particles and identical, but they don’t move around much unless energy is used to split them.
The electron however is an elementary particle that moves outside of the nucleus and can move from one atom to another. So the hypothesis is that if we could follow one electron from the big bang to the end of the universe, and this electron could move both forwards and backwards in time, it would potentially be enough with just one.
It probably doesn’t hold up very well, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.
It’s one of those things which would be pretty much impossible to prove, but it holds well with the effects we currently see. Electrons can annihilate by colliding with positrons. But the collision we see could be a single electron changing from moving forwards in time to moving backwards in time. It holds that it’s the same particle in the equations by cancelling out the minus sign of the charge with the minus sign in the time. So while we see a collision, the electron would just see itself changing charge and start moving backwards in time instead.
It’s a beautiful hypothesis, and fills me with chills to think about the electron “experiencing” all of history an unimmaginable amount of times.
Quarks and gluons are a roiling, seething sea of energy. The particles move at fractions the speed of light.
No, electrons are much smaller than protons, which are slightly smaller than neutrons.
I think they meant “aren’t all protons the same as other protons?, neutrons as other neutrons?, etc.”
Yeah exactly. I couldn’t think of how to phrase that exactly without a long explanation though.
It made sense to me. I also struggled to phrase it without sounding like I was insulting them for misunderstanding you.
You’d have to ask John Wheeler, which would be difficult since he died in 2008.
Just get the electron to ask him next time it goes back in time, duh
I would, but I only speak positronic.
Data?!
Nah, I only speak positronic. He thinks it.
Maybe, because we can measure the number of protons and neutrons with an ion accelerator? I don’t know if the something similar can be done with electrons.
Currently reading Hyperion… Got it, the electron is the Shrike!
Enjoy, it, Hyperion Cantos is far and away my all time favourite read (so far…)
