Could All Electrons Be Just One Electron Traveling Through Time?

[moving_on]

Just flipping through one of my many easy reading books...

Paul Davies 'About Time', 1995, Penguin p. 206...

'(John) Wheeler proposed that all the electrons in the universe are really one and the same particle, simply bouncing back and forth in time...'

'This offers a neat explanation for why all electrons appear to be identical'

I have no idea how this came about and would love to know.
In what way did he mean identical? I don't get it?
Is/was there a more technical forumlation for this that made any predictions?
I couldn't find the reference and I probably wouldn't be able to follow it as written anyhow.

Has it been completely disgarded as an idea at any level? If so what was the clincher?

The Feynman diagram for electron-positron interaction (sorry, can't manage to
replicate it here!) indicates that 'the same electron' appears in two places at once?
What about spin?

I think that's more than enough...

 

[feynmann]

Just flipping through one of my many easy reading books...

Paul Davies 'About Time', 1995, Penguin p. 206...

'(John) Wheeler proposed that all the electrons in the universe are really one and the same particle, simply bouncing back and forth in time...'

'This offers a neat explanation for why all electrons appear to be identical'

I have no idea how this came about and would love to know.
In what way did he mean identical? I don't get it?
Is/was there a more technical forumlation for this that made any predictions?
I couldn't find the reference and I probably wouldn't be able to follow it as written anyhow.

Has it been completely disgarded as an idea at any level? If so what was the clincher?

The Feynman diagram for electron-positron interaction (sorry, can't manage to
replicate it here!) indicates that 'the same electron' appears in two places at once?
What about spin?

I think that's more than enough...

I think what he mean is that there is one electron field. Electrons are just the excitation of that field. Similar, photons are the excitation of EM field. So they are all the same

 

[HallsofIvy]

No, he meant electron. Algthough I was under the impression that it was Feynman (note difference in spelling) who came up with that. Perhaps he got it from Wheeler and only popularized it.

The idea is this. Suppose you have an electron coming in along a line from the left. Far to the right a gamma ray creates a positron-electron pair with the electron going to the right and the positron going to the right. Eventually the positron and the orginal electron coming from the left annhilate leaving only energy. Draw that in two dimensions with the horizontal axis being the line of motion and the vertical axis giving the time. What you will see is a single continuous zig-zag line. If we interpret the positron as an electron moving backward in time, we see it as one particle being kicked backward and forward in time by bursts of energy. In that sense, there might well exist just one electron that is moving backward and forward in time!

 

[feynmann]

No, he meant electron. Algthough I was under the impression that it was Feynman (note difference in spelling) who came up with that. Perhaps he got it from Wheeler and only popularized it.

The idea is this. Suppose you have an electron coming in along a line from the left. Far to the right a gamma ray creates a positron-electron pair with the electron going to the right and the positron going to the right. Eventually the positron and the orginal electron coming from the left annhilate leaving only energy. Draw that in two dimensions with the horizontal axis being the line of motion and the vertical axis giving the time. What you will see is a single continuous zig-zag line. If we interpret the positron as an electron moving backward in time, we see it as one particle being kicked backward and forward in time by bursts of energy. In that sense, there might well exist just one electron that is moving backward and forward in time!

>>'(John) Wheeler proposed that all the electrons in the universe are really one and the same particle, simply bouncing back and forth in time...'

Just one electron in the whole universe? That's hard to believe

 

[daschaich]

I've always considered it a pretty silly idea, and I think Wheeler (Feynman's doctoral advisor) was just playing with the idea that positrons are "electrons going backwards in time" when he came up with it.

Actually, looking further I found a good discussion in Robert Oerter's recent book on the Standard Model, The Theory of Almost Everything (pages 102-104 in the hardcover edition):

Wheeler said, "Feynman, I know why all the electrons have the same charge and the same mass."
"Why?" Feynman asked.
"Because they are all the same electron!" replied Wheeler.

What Wheeler had realized was that, from a mathematical point of view, a positron is the same as an electron traveling backward in time. We can draw it like this:
http://daschaich.homelinux.net/images/Oerter1.png
The arrow shows the direction the electron is traveling, so the line with the arrow pointing backward in time looks to us like a positron traveling forward in time. So, we see an electron and a positron that get closer and closer (in space) until they annihilate, and we are left with only a photon. Alternatively, we can think of the same picture as depicting an electron traveling forward in time, which then emits a spontaneous burst of energy and starts going backward in time.

To see how this explains why all electrons look exactly alike, look at this diagram:
http://daschaich.homelinux.net/images/Oerter2.png
If we take a snapshot at a particular time (a vertical slice through the diagram), we see a collection of electrons and positrons, with the occasional photon. Alternatively, we can think of this picture as the history of a single electron, which is traveling back and forth in time, reversing direction whenever a photon is emitted or absorbed. Between reversals, the electron could be part of an atom, say, in your body. Eventually, that electron meets a positron and annihilates. The positron, though, was really the same electron traveling backward in time, where it eventually getz zapped by a photon to turn it into an electron again. That electron might be in a star, a rock, or a rock star. According to Wheeler's picture, every electron in your body is really the same electron, returned after many long trips back and forth in time. If it's always the same electron, the properties must always be the same.

Feynman saw the flaw in this right away, and perhaps you have, too. It's exactly the problem of the missing antimatter. A vertical slice through the diagram is a snapshot of the universe at a particular time. In any vertical slice, there are as many backward-arrow lines (positrons) as forward-arrow lines (electrons), if Wheeler's picture is right. Unfortunately for Wheeler, we know this isn't true. (Wheeler suggested that the positrons might be "hidden in the protons or something," which turns out not to be the case either, as we will see.) As appealing as Wheeler's idea is, it is wrong. The lack of any distinguishing features of electrons is a fundamental feature of relativistic quantum field theory; more than that we cannot say. However, the idea that a positron is the same as an electron moving backward in time is correct, and will be crucial to our understanding of relativistic quantum field theory.

 

[moving_on]

thanks for the quote daschaich
The 'missing antimatter' was also mentioned in Davies book although I did not
quite gather from the text that the matter had been so completely settled.

 

[Autochthon]

Didn't Bohm play with a similar idea when he was toying around with his implicate order ideas?

 

[mikek]

Would you mind clarifing the following.

I keep looking for an electron 'particle' and what is I see is a quanta of energy (with a wave) interacting with other quanta of energy. What is the true material nature of this particle? It has mass, but is the mass just the weight of the quanta of energy?

Slightly embarradded to start a new post on this one.

 

[debra]

I cannot quite grasp if this means there is only one electron in the entire Cosmos or something else?

 

[daschaich]

I cannot quite grasp if this means there is only one electron in the entire Cosmos or something else?

Wheeler's idea was that the same electron could be traveling back and forth in time, so what looked like many (many!) electrons and positrons were really the same one. This idea was not correct, so stick with "something else".