yes, when 'things interact things change'...from Leonard Susskind's description 'propeller particles'
So while we are at it describing particles, electrons or otherwise, let's take a look at the 'size of a fundamental particle' and see there is no 'real' answer, at least no simple one. The Standard Model of particle physics is a model with point particles and quantum fields...maybe that view is a bit too simple:
From Leonard Susskind [whose work in black hole complementarity has won him widespread recognition] THE BLACK HOLE WAR, Chapter 20:
[Susskind is relating here views of quantum field theory and string theory and while he uses 'atom' in the following description, he is could just as well have used 'particle', electron or 'photon'
Black Hole complementary was proposing something...radical. Depending on the state of motion an atom might remain a tiny microscopic object or it might spread out over an entire horizon of an enormous black hole...William Unruh showed that near a black hole horizon thermal and quantum jitters get mixed up in a odd way...
[This refers to the fact that a hovering observer and a free falling observer will 'read' very different radiations emanating from a black hole horizon. So the observed 'size' of a particle, the very existence of a particle and it's energy is impacted by the presence of a cosmological horizon.]
Elementary particles are usually imagined to be very small objects. Quantum Field Theory begins by postulating particles that are so small they can be regarded as mere points in space. But that picture soon breaks down...
[Susskind compares such 'particles' to a rotating airplane propeller...where maybe all we can see is the hub, and maybe the inner portion of the blades...but progressively faster high speed photos [better resolution] would reveal additional extended structure...we can see further out on the rotating blades...see further quantum jitters otherwise hidden from us!]
...If experiments cannot tell us whether particles have outlying high-frequency, vibrating structures#, then we have to appeal to our best theories...[so when you speed up the shutter taking a picture] what you see is that every piece of the string is fluctuating and vibrating so the new pictures look more tangled and spread out...String theory and QFT share the property that things appear to change as the shutter speed increases. But in QFT, the objects do not grow...String theory is different ...as things slow down, more and more 'stringy' propellers come into view. They occupy an increasing amount of space so that the entire complex structure grows...To most [Quantum Field Theorists] the notion of growing particles with unbounded, jittering structures was extremely foreign...Ironically the only other person who had hinted at such a possibility...was Gerard't Hooft...his work also expressed a sense that things grow as they are examined with increasing time resolution.
{# What he is implying is that finer resolution requires shorter wavelengths...higher frequency and hence more energy...and that disturbs the very particle we are trying to observe preventing us from viewing it as it really is.]Note that a free unbounded electron extends all over the place; it's unconstrained. Put it in a potential well...or any structure... and it becomes 'confined' as can only have certain discrete energy levels...and certain spins. This means an electron in a hydrogen atom and one with a metallic lattice have different energies...and different sizes!
So in my earlier post where I mentioned string theory suggests that hidden dimensions affect the properties of particles, you can imagine here a connection between the physical size of a particle and observable dimensions...that is, degrees of freedom affect the size of particles!
So now a 'point' particle and a' wave' can each take on additional characteristics and behaviors.
