what is the shape of an electron?

E

Enoc

Registered Senior Member
I know that electrons are actually invisible as they do not emit (or reflect) light. They cannot be seen but only be touched by other particles as by scattering.

But assuming we could look at an electron through a magnifying glass then in what shape would the electron appear?
 
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I don't think you can actually "see" anything at that scale, what you see with a magnifying glass is limited by the wavelength of light.
 
electron_1.jpg


One of the year’s most remarkable motion pictures lasts just 3 seconds—and that’s after it has been slowed down a billion billion times. The film documents an electron in motion the instant after it was booted from an atom by an ultraviolet pulse. Created by an international team of physicists, the movie is the first of its kind.

But a new method that generates supershort bursts of laser light allowed researchers to nab a high-resolution shot of the elusive electron. Each flash of light lasted only an attosecond. To comprehend how brief that is, consider that one second contains about twice as many attoseconds as there are seconds in the 14-billion-year life of the universe, says physicist Johan Mauritsson of Lund University in Sweden, who led the study [subscription required]. An electron orbits a hydrogen atom in about 150 attoseconds.

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/070
 
Enoc said:
I know that electrons are actually invisible as they do not emit (or reflect) light.
Click to expand...

Sure they do. Pretty much all the light around you is emitted or reflected by electrons one way or another. Catching them individually is tricky though yes.

Enoc said:
They cannot be seen but only be touched by other particles as by scattering.
Click to expand...

This is how we see anything. Light from some source has to hit the object of interest, scatter off it, and go into our eyes. Electrons are no different. The problem is that electrons are point particles and have no internal structure, so far as anyone can tell. So there is nothing to see in that sense. You can however image electron distributions, maps of where electrons like to spend their time in one system or another, say in orbit around atoms. The picture cosmic traveller has shown is something like this, although I haven't quite figured out exactly what it is from the abstract of the paper it comes from... (http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v100/i7/e073003)
 
The intuitive notion of seeing does not apply to quantum entities like electrons.

From the particle view, electrons usually move so fast that you only can see tracks in a Cloud Chamber or pixels on a cathode ray tube. If an electron could be stopped (or slowed down enough to be seen), the Uncertainty Principle would result in its being somewhere in a voume of space orders of magitude greater than the alleged size of the electron.

From the wave view, you do not actually see the waves. You only see patterns on cathode ray tube screens.
 
Physics can answer some questios about reality but definitely not all of them. For instance, physics cannot answer why some particles are invisible to humans while others are not. In fact physics cannot solve one of the greatest mysteries of all: of why there is life that people enjoy in the first place or why there is a perceptor who can enjoy the world in the first place? Or why there is something instead of nothing?

Determinist thinking cannot answer all these why questions. These problems belong to the realm of religion, metaphysics, perceptional psychology, sociology and history.
 
So your initial question was really just a ploy to allow you to post that.
 
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Enoc said:
But assuming we could look at an electron through a magnifying glass then in what shape would the electron appear?
Click to expand...
Apple-like. In similar vein a photon is something like a lemon. But don't think of these things as billiard-ball particles with a surface that you can see. They have a wave nature, with as much shape as a seismic wave.

Determinist thinking can answer these questions.
 
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