EXACTLY WHAT DOES THE ELECTRON LOOK LIKE?

In June, 2014, I lectured at the Physics Department of the Czech Technical University in Prague. I began by asking the question "What does the electron look like?", and I presented 2 images. The first was the familiar Rutherford photo of particles orbiting a nucleus, and the 2nd was a (very simplified) photo of the electron as a field in the area surrounding the nucleus.

Then I wanted a vote. Rather remarkably only four people in the crowd chose the field photo, and not a single person picked the particle photo. In other words, THEY DID N'T KNOW. So here we are, 117 years after the electron was identified, and this highly educated group of physicists had no idea what it looks like.

Naturally when the electron was discovered by J. J. Thomson, it was naturally pictured as a particle. After all, particles are simple to imagine, while the field idea, let alone a quantized field, is not a very easy one to understand. But this photo soon ran into problems that led Niels Bohr in 1913 to offer that the particles in orbit image must be replaced by something new: undefined electron conditions that satisfy the following two postulates:

1. [They] have a peculiarly, mechanically unexplainable [emphasis added] stability.

2. In contradiction to the classical EM theory, no radiation takes place from the atom in the stationary states on their own, [however] a process of transition among two stationary states can be followed by the emission of EM radiation.

This led Louis de Broglie to suggest that the electron has wave properties. There then followed a sort of conflict, with Paul Dirac leading the "particle side" and Erwin Schrodinger the "wave side":.

We insist that the atom in truth is just the ... phenomenon of an electron wave captured, as it were, by the nucleus of the atom ... From the point of view of wave mechanics, the [particle image] would be just fictitious.-- E. Schrodinger.

Nevertheless the fact that a free electron acts like a particle could not be overcome, and so Schrodinger gave in and Quantum Mechanics became a theory of particles that are defined by probabilities.

A 2nd battle happened in 1948, when Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger (along with Hideki Tomanaga) created various methods to the "renormalization" problem that plagued physics. Again the particle view espoused by Feynman triumphed, in huge part considering that his particle diagrams demonstrated simpler to deal with than Schwinger's field equations. So 2 generations of physicists have been brought up on Feynman designs and led to believe that nature is made from particles.

In the meantime, the theory of quantized fields was refined by Julian Schwinger:.

My retreat started at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the summer of 1949 ... Like the silicon chip of more recent years, the Feynman diagram was delivering computing to the masses ... But inevitably one has to bring it all together again, and then the piecemeal method loses a bit of its appeal ... Quantum field theory must work with [force] fields and [matter] fields on a completely equal ground ... Here was my challenge.-- J. Schwinger.

Schwinger's last variation of the theory was released between 1951 and 1954 in a collection of five documents entitled "The Theory of Quantized Fields". In his terms:.

It was to be the purpose of further developments of quantum mechanics that these 2 distinct timeless principles [particles and fields] are combined and become transcended in something that has no classical counterpart-- the quantized field that is a fresh conception of its very own, an unity that replaces the classical duality.-- J. Schwinger.

I believe that the primary reason these work of arts have been ignored is that many physicists considered them too tough to understand. (I know 1 who could not get past the very first page.).

Therefore the choice is all yours. You can believe that the electron is a particle, in spite of the many inconsistencies and absurdities, not to mention questions like how significant the particles are and what are they made of. Or you can believe it is a quantum of the electron field. The choice was described this way by Robert Oerter:.

Wave or particle? The answer: Both, and neither. You could consider the electron or the photon as a particle, but only if you wanted to let particles behave in the bizarre way illustrated by Feynman: appearing again, disrupting each other and canceling out. You can also think of it as a field, or wave, but you had to keep in mind that the detector always registers one electron, or none-- certainly never half an electron, no matter just how much the field has been split up or stretched out. Ultimately, is the field just a calculational instrument to tell you where the particle will be, or are the particles just calculational tools to tell you what the field values are? Take your pick.-- R. Oerter.

What Oerter neglected to mention is that QFT explains why the detector constantly registers one electron or none: the field is quantized. The Q in QFT is extremely important.

So when you choose, dear reader, I really hope you will not pick the image of nature that does not make sense-- that even its proponents call "bizarre". I wish that, like Schwinger, Weinberg, Wilczek, Hobson (and me), you will choose a truth made of quantum fields-- properties of space that are explained by the equations of QFT, the most philosophically appropriate picture of nature that I can think of.

More on the blog at Fields of Color.