🚀 go-pugleaf

Followups to sci.physics exclusively.  I have no idea what dk.videnskab
discusses.

In sci.physics, Louis_N@edu.herlufsholm.dk
<Louis_N@edu.herlufsholm.dk>
 wrote
on Fri, 25 Jul 2008 02:10:33 -0700 (PDT)
<bc9db64a-998d-4941-8ea0-1c40949c1048@z16g2000prn.googlegroups.com>:
> ARE ELECTRONS PHYSICAL ENTITIES?

Finger, meet nose.  (Not too harshly; this is an
instructive tap, not a sucker punch.)  What is the
finger and the nose?  For the most part, they are clouds
of electrons swirling around tiny, positively charged
masspoints -- carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, a little
sulfur and iron and a few other things; in fact, my finger
and your nose are mostly empty space.

But you'll still feel it. ;-)

On a more refined scale, envision such things
as Millikan-Fletcher (usually referred to as "the
Millikan oil-drop experiment".  A single electron is
apparently trappable in an oil droplet, floating between
charged plates.  One can also contemplate batteries,
electromagnetics, and electron guns -- most older-style
monitors required an electron gun to shoot particles at
a phosphor screen, and a pair of electromagnets -- the
yoke -- make sure it goes to the right color point at
the right time.  If a monitor is not physics, what is
one seeing?

> If an electron is a physical matter-/energy ?particle? then it MUST
> have a maybe not definite mean geometrical extension.

It might, in some models.  Nowadays the standar
explanation, however, involves a probability cloud --
and this explanation is strongly suggested by certain
experiments.

>
> THE STANDARD-MODEL IS NOT ULTIMATE, MAYBE WRONG?

The standard model is probably wrong in half a dozen spots
(and the masses of quarks look strangely engineered), but
I for one lack a better explanation of various phenomena in
this Universe.  The Bohr model of the atom has fallen into
disuse, alongside the J. J. Thomson variant and the notion
of indivisibility first coined by someone in ancient Greece
(from which one derives the very name: atomos is greek for
"uncuttable" or "indivisible").

> It is in the not ultimate standard-model of ?elementary-particles?
> that an electron is described without a physical geometrical
> extension.
> In the standard-model of ?elementary-particles? the electron is
> described as a ?point-particle? that have been given AD HOC physical
> properties as mass, electric charge, spin, magnetic moment etc.
>
> It must be time experimentally to discover the ?true? nature of the
> electron!

And how would one propose to do that?  Best I can do is
throw it at things at high speed -- the Bevatron comes to
mind, or the Large Hadron Collider (though that's more
suitable for large hadrons; the electron is a lepton).
Perhaps the NHTSA (or whatever it's called now) and CERN
should collaborate, though I wouldn't go quite so far as
to suggest we invent tiny airbags for the doomed hadrons...

>
> Best regards
> Louis Nielsen
> Denmark

-- 
#191, ewill3@earthlink.net
Q: "Why is my computer doing that?"
A: "Don't do that and you'll be fine."
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