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phoenixankit
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What does an electron look like? What is it made of? It has to be made of something? Can we/Have we been actually able see an electron?
Says who?phoenixankit said:What is it made of? It has to be made of something?
It just does! (I don't get your point. If an electron were made of something else--call them thingons--how would that answer your question? Someone would just ask: What are thingons made of? They must be made of something!)phoenixankit said:Well, then how does it have mass?
Sure, saying "it just is" isn't much of an answer, but that might be the best we can do right now. I don't think there's an accepted answer explaining how mass exists.phoenixankit said:Well, yeah, it is a lame Question...but the "it just does" part is what i did not expect from physics
Sorry, but I don't understand any of these three statements. Electrons have charge, but I wouldn't say they are made of charges (whatever that might mean). Thus I don't know what "charges are energy" means, or why that would imply something about the electron's mass.If e's are just made of charges,charges are energy, and energy does not have mass
Doc Al said:Sure, saying "it just is" isn't much of an answer, but that might be the best we can do right now. I don't think there's an accepted answer explaining how mass exists.
Sorry, but I don't understand any of these three statements. Electrons have charge, but I wouldn't say they are made of charges (whatever that might mean). Thus I don't know what "charges are energy" means, or why that would imply something about the electron's mass.
phoenixankit said:Well, then how does it have mass?
profmo said:Recent research shows that electrons are spheres.
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/25/136656087/what-shape-are-electrons-scientists-try-to-find-out
malawi_glenn said:something has to be elemtary.
profmo said:Recent research shows that electrons are spheres.
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/25/136656087/what-shape-are-electrons-scientists-try-to-find-out
kthayes said:are atoms spheres? protons?
bugatti79 said:Folks,
I came across this article which has confused me
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110525131707.htm
I thought that electrons and photons cannot be described classically as spheres because they are smeared out in space until the act of measurement. Then because of the probabalistic nature of QM, we can only guess what it might look like...but they seemed to have measured it extremely accurately...it not making sense for me...
Thanks
JesseC said:Is this simply bad BBC science reporting?
jtbell said:Yes. A better statement would be that the electron's electric field has been confirmed to be spherically symmetric, with greater precision than before. A point particle produces a spherically symmetric electric field. Of course, so can a spherically symmetric charge distribution; but no sign of a finite size has been seen either. There are other experiments which set an upper limit on the radius of the electron's charge distribution.
phoenixankit said:All so confusing...It has a mass, but it is just a point. Point particle. zero-dimensional. No volume.
Still got mass..
The Dude 321 said:Research has just been released that shows that the electron is very spherical indeed! :D
I think ZapperZ, you can have no argument after this! :D
http://fxn.ws/jHwfeQ
phoenixankit said:Well, yeah, it is a lame Question...but the "it just does" part is what i did not expect from physics
If e's are just made of charges,charges are energy, and energy does not have mass
homology said:hi Guys,
I just caught wind of this updated result at Nature:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v473/n7348/full/nature10104.html
Seems to me that what's being measured is an attribute of the electron that, classically, we would attribute to a spherical mass. Do you think they're claiming the electron is a sphere? I can't imagine they are.
Cheers,
Kevin