What Does An Electron ACTUALLY Look Like?

[@einfisch3891]

as a chemical engineer, I am frequently thinking about and using the properties of electrons every day to do chemistry. And in general, the properties of these little things are pretty well understood, and we've gotten really good at making them do what we want. And yet, when you start to ask the question "what actually IS it?", all the sudden, the answers we have start to get more and more uncertain and fewer in quantity. Its crazy, the way the universe is just endless layers of complexity in both directions of scale.

[@leonhardtkristensen4093]

Yes but that is what every body work with. I mean the baker knows well how to make the different kinds of bread but I doubt that he knows every thing about how to grow the grains for his flower etc. We are all making things well (more or less) of something that some body else or some thing else made. Nobody knows every thing. If our curiosity is bigger we may start to investigate and for some people that then becomes their job's. For others it is just a hobby. Some of those that have it as a hobby may actually be better at it than the professional ones. At least that is my experience with many things. Many professionals unfortunately don't accept that and I think that may be really bad with Physicians. They think that 5 to 10 years study is a pre request for any body to be allowed to enter the conversation. I am an electronic engineer with an engineering degree that demanded a 4.5 Year apprenticeship and then a 5 year study. I have med many people that know certain details a lot better than I do without any big education. My education was really just a help to make it easier for me to self study what I (or be taught) a specialized field. Educations are often not the end product.

[@superioropinion7116]

Have you ever tried to imagine how an electron feels doing the bidding of the chemists?

[@jonathanmitchell5171]

Sounds like the edge of material science. Greatly needed to balance advancements in the other regimes.

[@einfisch3891]

@jonathanmitchell5171 it's funny you say that, I'm actually a material scientist by training, more specifically a metallurgist, but I just say chemical engineer because it more accurately describes what I do to the layman.

[@no.one.2]

In *all* directions of scale, not both. Isn't it?

[@at0mly]

All electrons look the same to me.

[@QDWhite]

Because there only is 1 electron 😉

[@realzachfluke1]

Elementary particlist. Be ashamed.

[@dexterrity]

​@@QDWhite hmm in that case it must be moving forward and backward through time

[@Atok595]

So racist

[@Beegrene]

@@dexterrity That's the one electron universe: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

[@petersage5157]

I remember an introductory quantum physics lecture from Stanford (I'm pretty sure the series is still up on KZbin): "Electrons don't behave like waves or particles. They behave like electrons." It's a bit of a deepity, but it helps illustrate how unintuitive the quantum world gets.

[@hoebare]

Student: is an electron a wave or a particle? Teacher: no

[@ignotumperignotius630]

Deepity?

[@cloudpoint0]

@@ignotumperignotius630 A deepity is a statement that can be interpreted in two ways: as true but trivial, or as more intriguing but false. Clear?

[@petersage5157]

@@ignotumperignotius630 A deepity is a statement that is seemingly profound, yet trivial and meaningless. Of course electrons behave like electrons; they're not going to behave like moons or politicians or numbers. To further illustrate, they _are_ a bit like children in that sometimes they misbehave.

[@AntiCitizenX]

Except they are absolutely governed by a wave equation, so I’m not sure what your professor was smoking.

[@theosalmon]

There's a certain trigger that goes off in my head, the moment I perceive, a change in the tonality, of the soothing tone's of Matt's voice, when he inexorably heads toward, that final point, describing to us viewer, something amazing, about spacetime.

[@michaelpapadopoulos6054]

ayyyyy!!! He said the thing!!!

[@palanthis]

I am going to take your comma key away.

[@MrShanester117]

You’re being creepy

[@0ctopities]

lol, is "the O salmon" code for pvssy,.nice!

[@c9brown]

It feels like crossing the event horizon

[@Aphasial]

Always enjoy the ability to explore those 20 orders of magnitude or so sitting between our smallest “particle” concepts and the actual Plank length where it all goes awry. The notion that there’s almost the size of a person as compared to a galaxy between what we think of as the smallest chunks and the actual pixel limit implies there’s just that much more we still need to understand about the Universe.

[@davidtatro7457]

We don't even know if the Planck Length is an actual limit for pixelization. We only know that it's a hard limit for any possible observation, because if we put enough energy into a small enough space to exceed that, it would just create a singularity. So yes, l agree with you!

[@bigdaddynero]

This is what lead me to believe that the universe is fundamentally infinite in all aspects.

[@efdangotu]

I think the singularity is a relic of bad math parameters and use of imaginary numbers. So I don't believe the big bang is a realistic projection of physics, it's just a black hole in the math.

[@danielh.9010]

@@bigdaddynero Aphasial mentioned the universes high but finite resolution, which leads you to believe "that the universe is fundamentally infinite in all aspects" ? Isn't that a direct contradiction?

[@bigdaddynero]

@@danielh.9010 He didn't, really. Just reread it to make sure.

[@ozzie_goat]

A police officer pulls over Heisenberg and asks him how fast he was going. Heisenberg responds, "I know exactly where I am though." The officer says, "You were going well over 100 miles per hour back there." Heisenberg throws his hands in the air and yells, "GREAT, NOW I'M LOST!"

[@rossracing6433]

The officer asks to search the vehicle and Heisenberg (foolishly) complies. "Did you know you have a dead cat in your trunk?" Asks the officer. "Well now I do!" Replies Schrodinger from the passenger seat

[@ozzie_goat]

@rossracing6433 Correct response. I was waiting for someone to do it

[@kousseilashakur672]

I didnt get it...both of the jokes, yours and the 1st comment (can u explain please

[@andyk2181]

​@ozzie_goat "Actually", interjects Galileo from the backseat, "we were only doing 40mph relative to the other traffic", "besides" adds Einstein, "we were well under the speed limit of 671 million mph"

[@microwave221]

​@@rossracing6433 the cop has seen enough and decides to place them all under arrest. Ohm resists.

[@yeeturmcbeetur8197]

As an electrician, it’s always blown me away at how we as a species have mastered controlling electricity but haven’t scratched the surface of what makes it tick (kind of); the electron.

[@kid_missive]

as a chemist, the electron tells me all its secrets 😝

[@Nagria2112]

we dont have a photo for the wall, but we chemists do most of our work by knowing how the electron "ticks".

[@MakeMeThinkAgain]

It's interesting that chemists have responded to you as it wasn't until around the time of the Great War that chemists had any notion of what was going on in chemistry at the level of electrons. For every chemist before that chemistry was a black box: you could predict how things would work but HOW and WHY was a complete mystery. And this was just over a century ago.

[@logicplague]

In Warhammer 40K, the Imperium knows how to build FTL engines, but have no idea what actually makes them work. Sounds stupid, until you read something like this. Knowing HOW a thing works, is very different from knowing WHY it works.

[@shammyh]

We built ships and learned how to sail, before we knew what caused the wind. Pretty neat human trick.

[@XuryFromCanada]

I saw one yesterday, it was visibly upset we didn't properly assign it positive charge by convention.

[@idris4587]

Conventional current no more!

[@jac.34]

what a negative guy

[@baab4229]

If he didn't hang out with photons that much he wouldn't be VISIBLY upset.

[@DrDeuteron]

it would be better if we called the positron "matter" and the electron "anti-matter", but we didn't know about antimatter when we decided the electron was matter. (no fr fr, this is why grand unified theories conserve B-L and not B+L)

[@magma90]

@@DrDeuteron the weak force interacts with left handed matter and right handed anti-matter, by treating electrons as anti-matter for the purposes of turning B-L into B+L, we would end up with the weak force interacting with left handed quarks, right handed anti-quarks, right handed leptons, and left handed anti-leptons, meaning that you would need to explain why the weak force interacts differently with quarks and leptons. This could be the basis of a theory of everything where the different interactions with the weak force causes quarks to gain colour charge, however it would make a theory not dependent on this, more complicated.

[@kevinlawrence1582]

I can't believe I've been watching this channel for like 8 years. This was like the first channel I subscribed to when I started watching KZbin 2016-17. It's come quite a long way

[@mudhen24]

Have you been watching long enough to know he isn’t the original host of this show?

[@cortster12]

​@@mudhen24 Not sure about him, but I have. He's really grown on me.

[@psychoedge]

​@@mudhen24 I do, barely. I think I found the channel right around the time Matt started hosting it :D

[@allthe1]

​@@mudhen24I remember those days fondly, but without regret. I liked the structured, big picture little lessons, but Matt is such a treat as a host.

[@mudhen24]

@@psychoedge Me too lol. Think i saw a handful with the old host and then they introduced the current.

[@DrDeuteron]

Don't forget, the atomic orbitals we draw are defined in a "fake" coordinate system (reduced mass coordinates), irl the nucleus is also in a "fuzzy" orbital.

[@b.clarenc9517]

Aren't the nucleus orbitals way more spatially condensed, given its higher mass?

[@windowsmaster3482]

@@b.clarenc9517 yeah but they still are uncertain like electrons if we try to get extreme close ups of them as well

[@Beanskiiii]

I really don't understand how people still believe there is no God when science itself points to a creator. Ecclesiastes 3:11 "He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has even put eternity in their heart; yet mankind will never find out the work that the true God has made from start to finish."

[@DrDeuteron]

@@b.clarenc9517 nuclear shells exist, and have some similarities to atomic orbitals,but are way more complicated: strong spin orbit, multi particle, iso spin, tensor forces, etc. I’m just talking about the picture of an atom that we draw. In a hydrogen atom, the proton is not stationary, it’s in an orbital around the barycenter, too. It’s just 1800x smaller because the proton is mass is 1800m_e.

[@chemboy717]

True orbitals ,looks where electrons to found,as we know general structure of atom ,where electrons are orbiting towards nucleus and think off electron electron replusion also dominates , so depends on electron nucleus attraction and electron electron replusion makes the sub orbital and those arent physical

[@Dark_Jaguar]

This slightly more wholistic look is very much appreciated! I had no idea that the uncertainty principle had to do with the local environment AROUND the particle in question and was a result of increased density of virtual particles.

[@LinkenCV]

More mindblowing - de Broglie Wavelength ~1/m. Which means more massive particle have less fuzziness. In vacuum rate of creation/annihilation of virtual particles with low mass bigger then more massive particles. And this "ping-pong" for massive particles not so frequent, which leads to smaller distancing from the initial point for same amount of time. And this is de Broglie Wavelength ~1/m

[@instytutfotonowy2637]

@@LinkenCV The de Broglie wavelength is likely a misleading concept. It fails spectaculary in Young type experiments with fullerenes (buckyballs). The fullerenes have de Broglie wavelength shorter than their radius but still show all the wave-like properties. They show interference pattern when passing through two slits.

[@LookToWindward]

It’s more the other way around. The local environment is the way it is because of the Uncertainty Principle. It’s what gives rise to the virtual particle pairs in the first place.

[@OuroborosVengeance]

​@@LookToWindward this is actually incorrect, my friend.

[@christiandevincent4334]

As someone who has a fascination with quantum physics and zero actual education in it yet, this is the first time I’ve had any semblance of an understanding of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Thanks for that! 9:29

[@joethestrat]

More puzzles, lead to more questions which lead to more unknowns. I love it.

[@schmetterling4477]

The only puzzle here is why nobody seems to be paying any attention in high school when we tell them that "quanta are small amounts of energy". That's the solution to the entire puzzle... or, better, there is no puzzle, there are only high school students with attention deficit.

[@boneladders]

who else heard Schrödinger's cat meowing around 6:03

[@jvcscasio]

I wish PBS would put some links for further reading

[@ticketforlife2103]

They do show every paper they discuss.

[@DrDeuteron]

wikipedia slash: Vacuum_polarization Ward-Takahashi_identity Fine-structure_constant#Variation_with_energy_scale Classical_electron_radius Self-energy Quantum_electrodynamics Renormalization

[@jonwesick2844]

Sean Carroll's "Quanta and Fields: Biggest Ideas in the Universe" is good. For the professional, try Robert Klauber's "Student Friendly Quantum Field Theory."

[@0ctopities]

@@jonwesick2844 Sean Carroll is a mini god

[@0ctopities]

the Royal Inst is good too, but u probably know tht but other might not,. ( quantum computing wants a link 2 u )

[@Audio_noodle]

I never considered the idea of self annihilation and different scales permitting THAT much different behavior. I'm left wondering how much of this is just theoretical and how much of this is something we have actually measured happening.

[@garethdean6382]

We've been able to measure the change of the electromagnetic force at higher energies (That is shorter distances.) This is part of what led us to electroweak theory, where the force unites with the weak force. So it has a decent grounding.

[@Turnoutburndown]

Fermilab had a good video on virtual particles a few months ago. Might give some more info kzbin.info/www/bejne/l6q0mYGCpseHfM0

[@bigdaddynero]

As far as I am aware, self-annihilation, as well as antiparticles, remain theoretical. Supposedly, particle accelerators have synthesized some antiparticles, but I'm not personally convinced. A lot of this kind of stuff is purely speculative based on mathematical theory and we don't really know if our form of mathematics can accurately portray the nature the universe.

[@cortster12]

​@@bigdaddynero antimatter is 100% confirmed without a shred of doubt. Look into it more.

[@TysonJensen]

We've forgotten the original philosophical conjecture of science -- reductivist materialism. We have no proof that reductivist materialism is true. If it is NOT true, what you would expect is exactly what we see, the harder you try to pin down what the "material" is, the weirder it gets. That's what you'd expect if the material was never really there at all, but only an approximation.

[@WhitefirePL]

I really like the animations explaining H. uncertainty and that positron screening issue. They are very simple graphically, but spot-on and super helpful for understanding.

[@samueldrapeau9106]

Love the diminished chords in the background music

[@instytutfotonowy2637]

1. Is the vacuum polarization picture at 11:25 correct? It shows virtual electron circles closer to the real electron than virtual postirons circles. 2. The number of virtual positrons and virtual electrons is exactly the same. So, how they can "screen" the real electron charge? An electric dipole layer cannot screen any charge. 3. The discussion of rapid motion of the real electron due to its annihilation with virtual positrons has nothing to do with electron's wave function spread described by Heisenberg Uncertainty Relation. The HUR would be valid even if there was no this Zitterbewegung.

[@blazethefaith]

Can electrons really "look" like anything? It seems like asking how wet a molecule of water is: if you try to answer it, you're actually answering a different question.

[@ugoeze7360]

Electron: _“paint me like one of your French girls”_

[@amihartz]

water molecules are exactly 1 wet

[@finwefingolfin7113]

The only thing we can see is photons. End of story.

[@jordancobb7553]

I wish I had around 47 billion molecules of water I’m thirsty but not too thirsty

[@petevenuti7355]

​@@amihartz damp I would say 2 wet , because two hydrogens for hydrogen bonds. But maybe that only makes sense if it's interacting with something that's two dry. So maybe I'll just call the molecule damp.

[@Turnoutburndown]

Yesss thank you for a chunky episode on quantum mechanics!! I know you try to balance the episodes on the very large and the very small, but I love the tiny stuff and hope this is the first episode in a big series!!

[@maskon1724]

“As we localize it in space time” might be my favorite ending yet after a video as complex and fascinating as this. Thank you PBS Spacetime for all that you give us.

[@GeoffryGifari]

That novium pen looks like a great gift to send someone working in science

[@maciejlewicki9084]

what a phenomenal material! intuitive, but 100% correct, detailed enough, but avoiding magic words that are often substituted for an explanation. hats off!

[@mattwinward3168]

6:03 **Schrödinger's cat meows in the background**

[@dubplatenate]

Your animations about electrons looked like gravity interacting with particles going from our reality to an infinite amount of realities and back and away.

[@Brotherdot]

Do we know what a photon hits, when it exites an electron to jump to a higher energy-level? Because if the photon and electron are both mindbogglingly small, how would they ever collide? Anyway, thank you for a great episode!😊

[@abody499]

YEAH MAGNETS

[@dennisestenson7820]

The photon doesn't "hit" anything. It interacts with the electron's electromagnetic field.

[@drdca8263]

There is uncertainty in both of their positions. There is a range of places each could be, and like, if you integrate over possible positions the products of the amplitude with which the electron is there with the amplitude with which the photon is there, I think this integral, or something like it, is related to the amplitude of the electron absorbing the photon (though there are also other things to consider, such as the spins of each being compatible, etc.)

[@LinkenCV]

Nobody knows because no one has explained the fine structure constant.

[@garethdean6382]

Something to keep in mind is that the electron CAN be very small, if you try to put it in a box, as it were. In an atomic orbital it covers a larger volume of space. While you can imagine it as flickering about, it's more accurate to say it DOES occupy the full volume and it is this that the photon interacts with. This is not so strange, electrons will bounce off of one another electromagnetically without 'touching'. This is part of what makes the forces of nature necessary.

[@nishgriff1]

I've been watching this channel since the beginning, and with each video I nod at the references to concepts covered before as if I truly understand them, and furrow my brow at new concepts. What's really amazing to me is that people devote their careers to understanding small pockets of physics and they truly can make sense of things like the electron.

[@gregr5077]

I love episodes like this, especially since it's a preview of a whole series that sounds really interesting. One thing that I am curious about - how would such a system be described without using virtual particles in this way? I don't know for sure, but my impression is that virtual particles are being invoked here in somewhat the same way they are in the common explanation of hawking radiation - that is, in a way that can help laypeople understand, but ultimately falls apart under closer scrutiny.

[@ChillyJackFrost]

I always get the impression that we're dealing with more and more clever contrivances. I think may be the best we can do. Every thing stands in relation to everything else. But we dissect the world into things and their mutual associations. The "reality" behind the symbols is weird af.

[@DrDeuteron]

no, he's describing well known Feynman diagrams. The only difference is that I think the experts don't try to imagine it as animatable time-ordered process, e.g. the one where the virtual positron annihilates a real electron is drawn as a single straight line electron from left to right, where, going from left to right, a photon is emitted up, and photon is emitted down, the up photon is reabsorbed, the down photon is reabsorbed. That's equivalent to the drawing at 9:50 when you apply "the Feynman rules" (the the things that turn a diagram into a math expression).

[@garethdean6382]

You'd use the math of waves, perturbation and interference, building the electron up from a series of 'pure' waves. This is somewhat what the virtual particle approach allows us to do; the electron is a complex waveform in space that can be split into a 'nucleus' and a set of virtual particles surrounding it, which all interfere to give us a smeared out, messy, complex entity.

[@Evan.the.Butler]

I just finished an intro to QFT course (I'm a physics undergrad) and we covered renormalization on the last day. This video really helped me understand the ideas leading up to it

[@tru7hhimself]

i'm really looking forward to those future episodes you've hinted at.

[@Hardy_Oxide]

Yeah... Still hoping for proton decay episode

[@ExtraTrstl]

This was a freaking banger! Thanks Matt & Co.! I can’t wait for the next in the series!

[@jajssblue]

Its nice to have a concise video that explains this nuanced idea to share with others.

[@LuisSierra42]

Certainly, this video had a point and was very well defined and not uncertain

[@physicswithpark3r-x3x]

@@LuisSierra42 but where was it going?

[@Cycyryable]

Your ability to communicate these topics never ceases to amaze me.

[@rupertchappelle5303]

You should never let other people think for you . . .

[@sergey_a]

It seemed to me that I had already watched the video, but it turned out that I had several videos mixed up in my memory: what the spin looks like, a photo of an atom, and a few more.

[@lanstar83]

I keep coming back to the quantum foam episode and the entropy one with the go boards.

[@eddierodas8004]

The question is flawed. If we things, we perceive photons. As a electron is that small and light, a photon with a high enough frequency would no longer be visible light, thus is it not possible to see an electron by definition

[@PerpetualScience]

You should've talked about the black hole electron, a Kerr-Newman black hole with the mass, charge, and angular momentum of the electron and how it's super-extremal and has Closed Timelike Curves(CTCs). Those are always fun.

[@kokiriforistima]

as far as I can tell, the only guy who works on that now is some old Russian physicist guy. I feel like it would be fun to play with that model some more, even if we know that it's wrong. I'm not a physicist though

[@oberonpanopticon]

I think they might’ve already done a video on that

[@Rocksite1]

All that being said, scanning tunneling "microscopes" have been able to image the bonds that electrons form in molecules; presumably with the strength of the voltage difference causing the tunneling, thus affecting the volume of the imaged cloud.

[@PhilipMurphy8]

This will go on my quality content playlist

[@VitoriaUniversal]

Everybody asks how electrons look like, but never asks how are electrons.

[@osmosisjones4912]

If subatomic particals could take any shape how deep can information get incoded

[@CrackHead330]

Friedwradt Winterberg, Takaaki Matsumoto, Vladimirovic Dubovik, Kenneth Ratford Shoulders, etc. etc.

[@JustSuperLightning]

It looks like something I've never seen before!

[@JustSuperLightning]

"no matter how far we zoom out." And apparently I still won't see it... 😁

[@cjwilliams3296]

This is the first video that explained this problem to me in a way that finally clicked. Thank you.

[@Zeegoku1007]

I have a question, if we don't know how it actually looks like...how exactly do we know that we are firing just 'one' electron during a double slit or some other experiment involving an electron gun ?

[@sparking023]

probably by measuring the charge, though I'm sure that measurement will also be prone to some uncertainty if you look close enough

[@jaredbutler957]

It depends on the device. Most electron guns produce many electrons that are sent to a detector via EM fields that is only sensitive to a single electron at a time. Another technique like single electron transistors use the architecture of the transistor and very precisely calibrated voltage pulses that physically can only generate a single electron at a time. None of this really requires any knowledge of what an electron “looks like”, just an understanding of its behavior.

[@Raine247]

I don't think they do know. They just guess

[@theorize999]

i’m 2 minutes in and I really love the way you’re framing this question… it’s like you’ve read my mind I’ve wondered exactly this stuff so many times!

[@leosphilosophy]

Ohhh I get it! "The Electron" is not an object, it's the _idea_ of an object, a placeholder name for an observation of a _region_ of activity. It's a verb, not a noun, a process not an object. All this time I thought theoretical physicists were a little mad for thinking infinity could be known as some finite object, when really what you're saying is, _if it were_ an object it would be infinitely small, and therefore, it is not an object, but we project or, superimpose, the classical idea of an object onto it. This video really helped clear away some confusing ideas there. Thanks PBSST!

[@Kevoc_Studio]

This is my headcanon until the universe says otherwise

[@leosphilosophy]

@Kevoc_Studio haha nice

[@OneLine122]

Pretty much that.

[@luizbotelho1908]

Congratulations! .You get it correctly!.

[@siquod]

This guy electrons.

[@twilliamgage]

So much teasing in this one! I really hope all these 'soon to come' videos will be released sooner rather than later 😅

[@DanielKRui]

I hope they link the relevant videos too... it's hard to tell what videos are in a series

[@OnNightmareRadio]

@@DanielKRuisomeone needs to go back and link(s) to the “future videos” in older videos.

God damn, this was AMAZING. Probably one of my favourite videos on this channel. I absolutely LOVE when you talk about quantum mechanics, and especially when you talk about fundamental questions like this, that are extremely hard to explain to dumb folks like me. So good

[@stevenguevara2184]

Made it untill 5:06

[@XavierDrake]

Wtf I looked at this content right at the same time

[@ThanatosReturns]

This presentation is so much more educational than my intro to quantum physics at uni back in 1994.

[@Avocado-Toast-TV]

I have no idea what an electron looks like, but I hope it wears cool sunglasses and drives a fancy electronmobile!

[@jtgullickson6117]

I thought you were gonna say wears sunglasses and does drugs... my poor poor troubled mind..

[@ravenmad9225]

I watched the video,and I still don't know what an electron looks like.

[@Thundereus]

​@@ravenmad9225Because it has not a body but is a wave moving around by disappearing and appearing again at another location as the ripple of energy itself. Colors and shapes don't exist at this scale. Maybe it helps to simply imagine it as a ball that teleports around extremely fast. Trying to zoom into the electron makes it look like a dot with diffuse outlines that transition smoothly. You will never be able to see more than that, just more and more blur as you kind of start to look throught it at some point. At least this is what I assume from this video.

[@Illumignostic]

The electron mass/charge discrepancy reminds me of the finformation storage at the event horizon of a black hole paradox. Seeing these correlations and finding the algorithym that unifies the scale would probably be a big step.

[@TheGodParticle333]

Very good stuff

[@zacharywong483]

Super informative and professional video, as always!

[@feynstein1004]

So, you have a particle for me? No, sir, I don't

[@ObjectsInMotion]

Probing the infinitesimal is TIGHT!

[@feynstein1004]

@@ObjectsInMotion Yeah yeah yeah

[@oscaroblivion6570]

"Oops!" "Oopsy!!"

[@QueeenSativa]

Ooo ooo! 🤚 I haven’t gotten to the end yet but…. I wanted to share how I’ve been picturing them. Ringing a singing bowl, there’s a point where you get a feel for the “handles” on the wheel around the circle, and just below the rim around the outside, those handles are the upward crest of the wave traveling around the outside. Number of waves, height of peaks… I think those are like electrons. Because wave mechanics are wave mechanics no matter the scale. Oh and for the finite resolution I came to a gross gross from gravity’s 9.8 and just played with it a bit. And you’ll know you found it when 108 starts popping up everywhere. 😂

[@RussellBeattie]

I'd love to see a video about the Wave Function that doesn't use the word "function". In other words, explain how a function (a map between two number sets) is represented in 3D reality. From what is explained, the wave function isn't just a probability cloud of where some particle is located, but an actual thing. How is a function a thing? Explaining the whole concept without using the word function would be interesting to see.

[@3rdPartyIntervener]

theorists need to remember the adage "the map is not the terrain" when equating their models to reality

[@Andrey.Balandin]

No, the wave function is not a thing. It's a law of evolution of quantum properties of what we conventionally call a particle. Square of the wave function gives you the probability of finding the particle in a particular location. It is a mathematical description of something that you cannot touch or even rationally visualize.

[@seanrose4239]

My understanding is that the wave function is real much in the same way that a parabola is a real representation of a thrown ball's trajectory. It's not an actual physical thing, it's a function that predicts what we see in our measurements.

[@drdca8263]

Would you prefer “state vector”? Edit: describing it as a “function” is I think largely a consequence of describing it in the position basis (or the momentum basis as well I guess). Though, for any basis, we can think of it in terms of a function with domain the indexing set of that basis. One can make an argument that the actual physical thing is not the state vector, nor even the state vector up to scaling, but the state functional, Or, I guess you might prefer to distinguish between the state and the state functional, but I think the distinction is mostly unnecessary. The state functional takes in operators and returns expectation values (the expected value of what you would get if you measured the value of that operator while in that state). The state is the “how it is”. The claim is that the “how it is” is nothing more than the “for each in-principle-possible measurement (or sequence of measurements), how likely are each of the possible outcomes?” And, to my mind this is pretty much the same thing as the state functional. Still, while the state functional might be more fundamental than the state vector (or not), state vectors are often more useful to think about.

[@amihartz]

The "wave function" is a bit misleading because like 90% of the time when people talk about the "wave function" they actually are referring to the state vector, which is something related but not technically the same and is definitely not a function. It is just a list of probability amplitudes for all the given possible measurement outcomes. Some people interpret this as the _epistemic state_ of the system, meaning it is not a _description_ of the system in the present, but your best _prediction_ as to what the system will be if you were to go measure it based on all available information. Some other people interpret it as the _ontological state_ of the system, meaning that the system would be blurred between all those states at once, in the exact proportions in the state vector. There is no agreement in the literature on how to interpret it.

[@Michb3ck]

One of the most inspiring views of such a „simple“, overlooked little detail of … space time.

[@brothermine2292]

If the Locality axiom doesn't hold, we shouldn't expect the "stuff" comprising an electron to be highly localized. And our confidence in the Locality axiom should be undermined by the Bell tests, which verified that nature violates Bell's Inequality (as predicted by quantum mechanics).

[@drdca8263]

By the locality axiom, are you referring to the axiom from AQFT (.. or QFT in general I guess?) that even-graded operators with supports that are space-like separated, commute (and if not requiring even grading, then super-commute) ? If not, what do you mean? My understanding is that even in the vacuum state, operators with spacelike separated supports needn’t be uncorrelated. Perhaps this could be enough for whatever it is you have in mind, despite being consistent with the aforementioned axiom of AQFT?

[@amihartz]

Bell tests only show that locality is violated _if you introduce hidden variables._ But quantum mechanics *_is not a hidden variable theory,_* so Bell's theorem simply does not demonstrate any nonlocality as part of quantum mechanics at all. Locality is only important because it is a necessary component of special relativity, which is experimentally verified repeatedly to very high precision, and is a necessary component to quantum field theory.

[@brothermine2292]

>drdca8263 : I'm referring to the more general axiom "nothing is influenced by anything outside its past lightcone."

[@drdca8263]

@@brothermine2292 so, by “influenced” you mean… the possibility of sending signals (which, if the influence is from outside the past light cone, would be an FTL signal)? or what? Because IMO the bell tests don’t seem to suggest the possibility of FTL signaling.

[@brothermine2292]

>amihartz : Although quantum mechanics doesn't contain hidden variables, it may be an incomplete theory that describes our incomplete information... there may be hidden variables, and Locality may be violated. Our understanding of space & time is only rudimentary. Einstein himself showed in the 1935 ER paper about wormholes that General Relativity can allow Locality to be violated.

[@Zambada88]

This is a great way to fall asleep. Your voice is so soothing and hypnotizing.

[@beecat4183]

The problem is that we always avoid what the question is ACTUALLY asking. We get so sidetracked with "the act of measuring x..." or "the way we see..." it's avoiding the question. The question is this: What would an atom look like to a magical deity, who does not affect atoms by observing or rely on light to see? What does an atom look like, if time were frozen, ignoring all side questions of how we see and the effects of measuring? What does an atom look like, removed from any other considerations? "

[@jorymil]

Ultimately that's something that we can't really answer. And it's fascinating! So we use the best tools we can to try and translate it into what our brains can perceive. Hence Feynman diagrams, graphs of wavefunctions, electron microscopes, etc. Maybe start by asking: "a bee can perceive ultraviolet light. What does the world look like to a bee?" Or "what does the world look like to a dog?" Another interesting question is: "does green look the same to me as to my mother?" If so, how would I know? As for the magical deity... all we can do as humans is to try and improve our understanding to the best of our ability, keep our sense of wonder, hope we get a little closer to what things might look like, and try not to assume our own ideas are those of the deity. After all, if we can't really imagine what the world looks like to a bee....

[@Raine247]

@@jorymilblah blah bro. We just wanna know what a fckn electron looks like and this video didn't answer the question.

[@shmunkyman33]

The problem is the phrase "look like" inherently implies using eyes to see something, which implies those eyes have lenses made of matter and use a detector of photons to measure how much light different pieces of an object reflects. At those small scales, eyes would not work, and light itself would fundamentally alter the state of particles. So any description would pretty much inherently be fiction, and sure, I'm certain a very creative physicist could come up with an amazingly poetic way of describing it, but it wouldn't really be a scientific answer, rather just that person's imagination. I think the bottom line is that we shouldn't expect our human biological senses to function the same (or at all) in every situation we might try to consider

[@Ikbeneengeit]

The problem is, "looking like something" is an emergent property particular to our human scale of the universe, that doesn't make sense at much smaller scales. Maybe it's like asking "what would great power politics be like if we zoomed into the level of someone's liver?"

[@Ludvigvanamadeus]

if you're not affecting a quantum particle, you're by definition not looking at it. Your definition of "looking" is a logical and physical impossibility, so if you're so desperate for an answer - just make something up yourself.

[@worschtebrot]

This channel is so incredibly awesome. Thank you so much for your work!

[@annaclarafenyo8185]

This is okay, but if you point out the classical electron radius, that the mass of a charge blows up as 1/R classically where R is the radius of fuzzing out, you should also say that quantum mechanically, the electron bouncing around leads the self-energy to blow up only as log(R), much, much weaker. This fundamental result is due to Victor Weisskopf, and was part of the reason renormalization was taken seriously.

[@instytutfotonowy2637]

Thank you for that remark! I could never wrap my mind around the Zitterbewegung but it is starting to speak to me this time ...

[@stevendaly4640]

And yet it is still just a convenient way to ignore that the math still spit out infinity and give results that are not consistent with reality.

[@annaclarafenyo8185]

@@stevendaly4640 log divergences are not really infinity in the same way as 1/r divergences.

[@donovansnyder2898]

Wow! I really like the new approach of more technical discussions, even though there is not a whole lot I actually understand.

[@NewMessage]

Selfies are officially out of control.

[@Axios-Lux]

I feel like im still missing a piece of the "why" behind the increase in activity due to the act of trying to more precisely measure. I thought I understood this with the idea that to get a perfectly localized image, we have to give up measuring momentum (like taking a photo turns anything into a still image and you have no idea how fast the thing is going). Essentially going too 100 on the sale if one, forces the other scale to be 0... but this video here makes it seem (to me) there is some mechanism that prevents us bringing a scale to 100 on anything, simply because we're trying.

[@jdhenge]

I thought it was because there is a greater probability of the "real" electron existing there, and all it's former versions having ready access to the recurring positrons. Like the refresh rate of the Universe is so fast that there is only ever one, but it appears that there are millions because it happens so fast

[@JackDespero]

There are a few things that hurt my brain when I learnt about them. Because they seem so obvious, so natural, so intrinsic to my understanding of the world that I never stopped to think "Wait, so how do we know this?" - One was the fact that we actually don't know whether the speed of light is isotropic or not. "We know that because of the experiment of Michelson and Morley that ruled out the aether!" In reality, all experiments that we have done to check precisely the speed of light are either light going back and forth, or light going in one direction and assuming the speed. What we experimentally know, in summary is 2c, from which we derive c. But we have never ruled out that it might not be c+c , but 0.5+1.5c, for example. I can imagine an experiment in which with very precise atomic clocks we can device a measurement that would peak only if the speed of light is c, so you would launch simultaneous photons to two of these clocks in let's say 90 degree angles, and you will check if the assumption that both had exactly c on their one way, thus triggering the measurement peak, is correct. The only problem is that the correlation between space and time is precisely c, so if c is anisotropic, that anisotropy is already "baked in" our current understanding of physics and thus on this experiment. For the curious, this is called the "One-way speed of light" problem. - The second was learning that we say that the electron is "point like" because we have pushed the theoretical problem under the rug, so to say. When calculating a theoretical finite size for the electron, or any other lepton, we get very uncomfortable infinite. Since we cannot determine the mass of the electron theoretically, we used the renormalization that the mass of the electron is whatever we measure experimentally, applied to a point particle. I thought that would have been a problem very early in physics (forgetting that the electron is, in fact, not that old) and I was surprised to learn that people like Dirac and physicist not that long ago were very interested in the topic. In fact, we have never measured independently the charge and the mass of the electron experimentally, only their ratio. Sometimes I forget that this "natural" paradigm of physics would either break or amaze the mind of some of the greatest scientists in History, who happened to pass away before 1900.

[@tobiasreiig5954]

If light had the speed of 0,5c in one direction it would have to be infinite in the opposite direction to be equivavalent to the c1=c2 model. Not 1,5c. Correct me if im wrong.

[@JackDespero]

​@@tobiasreiig5954You are right that I am wrong: I wanted to express it in terms of time, and then at some point I changed to speeds and i forgot to change it. What I meant is that you know the time t that takes the photon to go and back, t. We usually assume that it is divided as t = t1+t2 with t1=t2. If it took 1 second, we usually assume that it is 0.5 + 0.5, but the same result (the measurement of the time) can be achieved if the split were 0.3+0.7. EDIT: Now I know why you mentioned the infinity. Yes, I chose the worst possible example without realizing. I could have said something like 0.7 and 1.75, but no, I had to choose precisely 0.5 and 1.5. Good catch.

[@ArronCharman]

The thing that really opened my eyes about electrons is the time scale they work on. It takes light approximately 247 zeptoseconds to cross a hydrogen molecule. There are also about 1,000 times more zeptoseconds in one second than there have been seconds since the Big Bang. To an orbiting electron, every second of our time feels like eons.

[@JustSuperLightning]

One electron universe, my planet! Even a single electron doesn't remain itself.

[@vandorb12]

Its still a fin thought experiment !

[@drdca8263]

Sure, but in a sense the way that it “doesn’t remain itself” is kind of what the “one electron universe” idea is about? And, while I don’t think the one-electron-universe idea is really *true*, because, for one thing, there are other processes which emit and absorb electrons, like beta decay, I think there is still something to the idea, in how the annihilation with positrons and the production with a positron pair, and this whole thing with the virtual pairs, kinda makes it so “different” electrons in a sense sorta don’t really have distinct identities.

[@bagelman2634]

Is the annihilation with a virtual positron and promotion of the virtual electron how quantum tunneling works?

[@jackmorrison8269]

Theres only one electron in the universe.

[@deodorantcan1200]

Ok

[@jeylful]

Great explanation and video! Thanks!

[@Larz99]

Sounds kinda like quantum whatchamacallit to me.

[@ravenmad9225]

Sounds like quantum bs to me.

[@DestinaSpace]

How does the behavior of electrons in quantum mechanics, like superposition or tunneling, influence our understanding of technologies like quantum computing or even space exploration? Would love to hear your take!

[@Chirokelley]

I remember as a chemistry undergraduate trying to “picture” an electron cloud. Ultimately that is nonsensical. Humans depend so much on eyesight (or other senses) to define reality. But there are many things that exist that we cannot sense, ultrasound, infra-red, ultraviolet, viruses. We can broaden our senses by developing instruments microscopes, telescopes, IR detectors, etc. And we can expand our innate senses for example the blind are more aware of other senses. It’s time to get past our idea that if it isn’t measurable, (sensed), it doesn’t exist. Because that only implies that we haven’t developed the tools (external or internal) to sense it. But speak for yourself. There are those of us who are actively working on expanding our senses, and have done so successfully. That’s my reality. If you question it, it’s from your limited capacity of ability to sense, or your limited humility. You might question my humility, but I know, that I don’t know what I don’t know. And I am aware of many, many people who are just as aware as I am. These skills are not unique. They may not even be uniquely human. Think outside the box.

[@Raine247]

You write too much. Just say what you mean without being dramatic

[@lanszoominternet]

I am waiting for the eventual explanation of how these properties of the electron interacting with protons result in the probability shells that influence all of chemistry.

[@chrisj9961]

11:17 please don’t do this blue red flashing anymore. Thanks.

[@HarisKhan-ld9rs]

Why? Are you epileptic?

[@cliptracer8980]

I have so many issues with you thinking they aren’t blurred shells when that’s what super fast in a small space is

[@RALLIR]

This is eye opening to me thank you i need time to mull this over more

[@judgeyzip53]

Wow, maybe I should have watched more of your vids, but now I understand the quantum field effect on particles better! while I understood virtual pair annihilation it never occurred to me to link the „real particle“ with the virtual pair. A real light bulb moment! Cheers Matt

[@iambiggus]

An electron and positron walk into a bar.. Positron: "You're round" Electron: "Are you sure?" Position: "I'm positive."

[@b.clarenc9517]

Hi positive, I'm round.

[@GeoffryGifari]

Wait... what kind of experiment can determine the upper bound of electron size?

[@Jhawk_2k]

Keep zooming in on the ocean until you see water An informed understanding of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics makes this the most intuitive explanation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle I'm aware of

[@3800S1]

Reminds me of how in a 3d modelling environment, the more accurate you want to manipulate the vertices by zooming and zooming in on them, the more they randomly jump around when you try to interact with them including just viewing them.

[@antirealist]

THE quintessential SpaceTime tune: Soft Gold by Frederic Mauric Fortuny. It puts me into a 'mysteries of the universe' kind of mood

[@ronhutcherson9845]

This was a lovely answer to what it means to see or visualize an electron. It was most helpful to me to learn how the chosen scale is integral to the answer/explanation.

[@schmetterling4477]

It may have been lovely, but it is wrong. An electron is simply a small amount of energy, momentum, angular momentum and electric and leptonic charge. There is nothing to visualize.

[@ronhutcherson9845]

@ Actually that’s what I took away from it - visualizations like these may give us a sense of what an electron is and what’s going on at those scales, but there is no picture to be had. But it’s so hard to get meaning from the mathematical expressions about quantum objects that I want something more to work with. I’ll settle for visual abstractions.

[@schmetterling4477]

@@ronhutcherson9845 That's the point: there is nothing to visualize. An electron is an exchange of physical properties that can be described with a totality of something like eight numbers.

[@AZREDFERN]

What if atoms are just waves, like watching water on top of a speaker. Interfering and canceling. After all, everything else is basically waves.

[@jesusramirezromo2037]

We've seen individual atoms directly

[@bengoodwin2141]

1:40 that doesn't seem like a real distinction, isn't an electron still a "wave" in the electric field? Those properties could, I assume, still exist in a "fuzzy wave function"

[@-ARYABANERJEE]

Hmm, how about quantum fluctuations triggering the electron mechanism?(like how a particle interacts with higgs field to trigger a higgs mechanism to gain mass)

[@GeoffryGifari]

So if an electron can self-annihilate with its QFT electron-positron pair, does that mean it's impossible to distinguish the "core" electron from the electron in the matter-antimatter pair? As if taking indistinguishability of particle statistics to the next level; not only two electrons are completely indistinguishable (fermi-dirac statistics), it's also impossible to distinguish a "real" electron from a "virtual" electrons around it

[@Strohbach86]

so if an electron and virtual positron annihilate eachother, do you get virtual gamma rays?

[@anjonde4086]

Matt’s hand gestures are so complex and varied, it almost looks like he’s signing

[@TheJohnblyth]

I suppose I’ll eventually watch this, but for now I feel compelled to point out that I see electrons almost all of the time, because every solid or liquid thing I look at has a visible surface consisting entirely of electrons, and light either bounces of, or is absorbed and re-emitted by electrons. Individually they’re too small to see, and in any case have the kind of extension in space concerning which fuzzy and very hard are both extreme oversimplifications. But by ‘look like’ you’re probably going to try to pin down either something about what might seem like the structure, or why that’s not a good way to think about electrons.

[@Anway-NeverGiveUp]

The more would be the collision of particles, the more would be the energy generated, the more would be the vibrations & waves formed, which could generate ample amount of possibilities for harvesting huge amount of energy...

[@Eldaralein]

Hi, I really enjoy these episodes. Thank you so much for making this knowledge available. I'm curious about the simulations you show here involving the electron. Are they accessible?

[@johnaweiss]

Has it been proven that a radio transmitter is perturbing an electromagnetic field, and not simply CREATING an electromagnetic field? 3:15 What do you call a "bit of electric charge" which isn't an electron? 4:01 "drag in" -- Wouldn't it be clearer to say "shrink"? We're not controlling your mouse.

[@paulmicks7097]

Thank you 👍 Great cliff hanger , makes me want to follow to next episode.

[@ThisIsNotCory]

This channel is always an inspiration. Bless you people.

[@RydarkVoyager]

How can you tell? Every time you try to shine a light on it, it moves off. They're very shy. And when they gather in numbers, they electrocute you.

[@2Sor2Fig]

Learning about s, p, d orbitals was my favorite part of chemistry, I always wondered why the orbitals had those weird lobes. Max Planck will always be my favorite, Wolfgang Paulie a tie at second alongside Descartes.