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10-Year Study Reveals Electron Shape
lee1 writes "In a 10 year long experiment, scientists at Imperial College have made the most precise measurement so far of the shape of the electron. It's round. So round, in fact, that if the electron were enlarged to the size of the solar system, its shape would diverge from a perfect sphere less than the width of a human hair. The experiment continues in the search for even greater precision. There are implications for understanding processes in the early universe, namely the mysterious fate of the antimatter."
I know the site is probably trying to be approachable, but what's wrong with saying 1e-29 m instead of this absurd measurement of 0.000000000000000000000000001 cm? This is getting close to the Planck length; no matter what you compare it to, it won't be a length you can intuitively grasp.
I could just see it now.
The crystal latice questions the electron about it's excercise.
Electron: I'm in shape, round is a shape.
Is it round or spherical?
Is it always round, even when it's tunnelling through a potential wall?
And I assume that by "round" they mean that every level curve of the probability amplitude has constant radius.
And, uh, what did they do about that Heisenberg thing? If you can't tell where the electron is relative to your frame of reference, how is the electron supposed to tell where a certain constant on its level curve is relative to its own frame of reference?
What other possible shapes were theorized for an electron? What are these theories based on? What difference would an egg-shaped electron make in the grand scheme of things?
I know why we should care, but I wouldn't mind knowing what theories exist to justify different shapes.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
It's incredible that the shape of one of the most fundamental particles in the Universe has one of the simplest mathematical descriptions! Is it a coincidence or is there some deeper meaning to this fact?
The shape of an electron is a sphere over 10 years? That's like saying the shape of the ocean is smooth as glass averaged over 10 years. Sure it's true, but it's misleading.
Better to light a candle than complain about the darkness.
I called it!
Uh, call me naive but I thought that electrons were point-particles and had no shape (being single-dimensional).
--AC
So.... it's a sphere when it is a particle?
For years, I've been trying to un-brainwash myself out of the early models of the electron as a little ball whirring around a nucleus, and convert to the probabilistic electron cloud model, as well as the wave/particle hybrid nature.
My head is about to explode. Can someone who is a physicist please chime in?
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when I made a model of an atom in 7th grade science and used spheres for electrons.
But it didn't look as good as her's: http://jeaninallhonesty.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-lizzy-made-atom-model.html.
Maybe its shape is indeed a perfect sphere and the "width of a human hair" is just a measurement error. How more precise they want to get, until its shape diverges a human hair from a perfect sphere when enlarged to the size of the galaxy? Is there an end to measurement errors? Am i making any sense? I think not, its late at night :x
Sig? Heil
Aren't electrons point particles? How can something be spherical if it has no radius?
What is the radius of the solar system anyway? Furthest planet (40 AU)? Furthest comet orbit (50000 AU)?
But more importantly, how much digits of pi would you need to describe this sphere accurately?
Lo and behold, for I am a sig!
10^-27cm (the spherical error in the article) is 10^-29m. The upper bound on the electron's radius is 10^-22m (Wikipedia). The solar system is roughly 1.5*10^13m in radius (Wolfram Alpha), so 3*10^13m in diameter. If you'd inflate the electron to the size of the solar system, scaling by 3*10^35, the spherical error would be 3*10^6m, which is more than twice the diameter of Earth, according to my calculations.
Could these finding be used as a Universal standard for measure? who the heck cares about what an A.U. is if you live outside the solar system?
Is there a tiny ( - )sign on its surface?
The numbers in the article don't work for me.....
Electron radius (wikipedia): 10^-22 meters
Article's claim of error-from-round: 10^-29 meters
Relative error: 10^7, or 0.1 parts per million
"Radius of solar system" randomly chosen as Eris's avg orbit fo 68AU (wikipedia): 1.017 * 10^13 meters
Relative error scaled to size of solar system: ~1.017 * 10^6 meters, or ~1017km
Now I don't know about you, but my hair isn't exactly 1000km thick, eh?
Avg thickness of human hair (answers.com): 0.1mm, or 10^-4 meters
Ratio by which Science Daily apparently cannot count: 10^10
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..that sub-electronic particles either do no exist, or they have no* mass. Otherwise the electronic equator would be at least a teensy* bit fatter, due to its spin.
*no and teensy are both about one over infinity. Plus or minus a tad.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Is it as round as George Michael's butt?
At last, the flat-electron rabble can finally give it a rest.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
Thats depends on a dick. If its yours, that sure its about same size
Our instrumentation at those levels is too "slow" and imprecise to "see" things clearly. Don't get too wrapped up in probability shields and the electron cloud model. It's going to be disproven and this will lead up to it, mark my words/call it a "prophecy" of sorts. It's said God's universe is without end, and Einstein said it was all relativistic. Our solar system's just an atom, and constellations are molecular constructs to a larger perspective and the reverse holds true infinitum on levels relativisitically lower than ours, and higher/larger than ours as well.
It would /be/ the size of the solar system!
What the hell use is an analogy that uses the size of the solar system? No reasonable person can visualize that any more than they can visualize the size of an electron.
An analogy has to be human scale.
Don't hate modern theories or science. Hate popular press coverage of it. I know I do.
Scaled to the size of the Library of Congress, its shape would diverge from that of a perfect sphere by less than 0.00049 dead interns in the closet. Or 0.0033 homosexual affairs with assistants, for the Republicans...
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
The experiment really measured the electric dipole moment, which was found to be order of magnitude 10^-28 De, with an error bar of the same size, meaning that its equal to zero within experimental error.
The electric dipole moment gives the one-dimensional deviation of the electric field of the electron from radial symmetry; if its not zero, the electric field of the particle would be egg-shaped. So, the measurement isn't really of the shape of the particle itself, but of its interaction with other charged particles.
How, exactly, do you define the concept of "shape" for something like an electron?
I mean, for a macroscopic object, our "common sense" definition of shape is the boundary at which an outside interaction would feel resistance - if you poke it, that's where you feel the counterforce (weak as it may be). This is actually caused by molecules interacting between each other, but at that point already the concept of "poking" something is kinda hazy, since you already get all that quantum mumbo jumbo strong enough to be prominent. By the time you go down to electron, the common sense approach would break apart entirely; so what is the definition, then?
I was a particle physicist in a previous life. I think, put simply, what is being referred to is attempting to measure higher moments of the electric field of the electron, ie dipole, quadropole, and higher moments. Basically what they are saying is that they measured the higher moments to be zero with a much smaller error bar than previously measured.
The deeper meaning is that the FSMs meaty balls must also be as round and consistent as these electrons. It is a fulfillment of the recipe.
...is that God did that freehand.
"Imperial's Centre for Cold Matter aims to explain this lack of antimatter by searching for tiny differences between the behaviour of matter and antimatter that no-one has yet observed. Had the researchers found that electrons are not round it would have provided proof that the behaviour of antimatter and matter differ more than physicists previously thought. This, they say, could explain how all the antimatter disappeared from the universe, leaving only ordinary matter. Professor Edward Hinds, research co-author and head of the Centre for Cold Matter at Imperial College London, said: "The whole world is made almost entirely of normal matter, with only tiny traces of antimatter. Astronomers have looked right to the edge of the visible universe and even then they see just matter, no great stashes of antimatter. Physicists just do not know what happened to all the antimatter, but this research can help us to confirm or rule out some of the possible explanations."
Is it possible that we can't find anti-matter because it's all in one place?
This is incredible! Sure they might be almost spherical, but the shape is slightly off! This small difference could have profound theoretical implications. First it means that an electron has volume, second it means they might have an inner structure to create that shape. Very interesting indeed. Might lead to new physics.
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They must not be talking about the p, d and f orbitals:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fjQAZidF9Kc/Tb9KIl_jaOI/AAAAAAAAADs/-jdC7QhF7QM/s1600/ch9orbitals1.jpg
Yea... its round. Thanks for the grant.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
None more round
The electron has no know substructure and is smaller as 10E-22 meters. So currently its considered a point particle. Now how the hell can they tell its round, if for our best knowledge iits a point?
But what is the radius of the electrons?
If an electron is just a wave I might have expected it to be more, well, wavy.
Or is this "shape" representing a distribution of its possible locations?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The story would have been much more interesting if went over the assumptions, and the holes in their methodology. Not just, "it doesn't wobble much so it must be very round". It seems like they are projecting some macro-world experiences into the micro-world.
What has Slashdot become?
Nice 6 digit uid there, kid.
This guy added absolutely nothing to this discussion. Mod me down as well if you want to be fair, I don't care. This guy has a karma that should be taken down to a default 0 or -1.
From what part of a human, exactly? And would this hair be blond, perchance?
Have gnu, will travel.
I can use that in my nonsensical techno-babble
but spinning very very very very very very very fast.
put out the rumour that the electron is not in perfect shape
when they start rushing to the gym, collect the electrical current and stiore the energy (by plitting water into Hydrogen and Oxygen for example
use the hydrogen to power vehicles
profit (and independence from foreign oil)
As soon as I read the title I thought "Not shit, its round Einstein!", and then they confirmed its round. Someone has wasted their life, should have just asked Slashdot.
An electron's shape includes the path that it takes through the "electron cloud". And that path has to date never been plotted with any accuracy, only its overall probability densities in spacetime. It's a fractal (since time's dimension is not an integer), and so it depends in part on the size and shape of whatever measures it.
--
make install -not war
The size of the solar system? Lets do away with unrealistic measurements... Compare it to something we can all understand like the library of congress.
I've always imagined that elementary particles must be point-like, without any actual volume. Does this study contradict that notion?
It just seems to me that it wouldn't make sense for electrons to have a volume, because that would imply some kind of structure. Nobody ever seemed to suggest that photons actually have a "shape", other than a point.
I was under the impression that an electron is not a hard constant sized object but is a wave constrained to fit the boundaries of the quantum mechanical environment around it. Though variable, also cannot be compressed into infinite density either. I also thought, from chemistry, that the electron 'fits' into the various orbital states but that it's not a tiny sphere 'bouncing around' inside them but indeed a wave constrained within the orbital shapes. I would think an unconstrained wave in three dimensions is obviously symmetrical and hence spherical, but always morphs shape under the influence of any outside charge. So what really was measured here? Grandpa in the movie Moonstruck: "I'm so confused!"
At what frequency would you need to have laser light in order to use it to detect an electron diameter (2 * 10^22), which is moving around at the speed of light. Even gamma rays have a wave length that is about 10^10 bigger than an electron. If you try to measure 'wobble' of a particle with a classical radius that is seven orders of magnitude larger than its quantum radius, then how could you assume that it 'wobbles' at all?
It may not be round; it may just be a perfectly symmetrical charge.
It would be interesting to know how the quarks that make up neutrons and protons behave. Do they cluster like a bag of bags of marbles (separate clusters), or cluster like a single bag of marbles (single cluster), or superimpose (one blob, probably spherical). Do these clusters stretch, especially in covalent bonds?
Do we perhaps already know?
Oblig: http://xkcd.com/895/
I thought the theory was that an electron is a point-particle (a mathematical perfect point, having zero diameter).
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
No, in fact they found there was a systematic pattern in the deviation from a perfect sphere, and when they made a map of the surface pattern they found a Laura Ashley wallpaper flower pattern. This has lead to a lot of speculation on the intentions of the grand designer.
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ERROR 42: What was the question?
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Like hell its round
what about equatorial speed?
137c, is it possible?
After reading the summary I really thought this was an onion article.
...does it taste like grapeade?
"The experiment continues in the search for even greater precision."
If they've discovered so far that it's about as round as can be, why are they wasting their time looking for more precision!? Let's just say it's perfectly round and call it a day.
Or maybe they're like the yahoos posting above that can kill hours talking about the shape and size of things of no consequence!?
No mod points, but if I had you would have got one.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Maybe they weren't measuring what they thought they were measuring.
I was always under the impression that the electron was a 0-dimensional point, i.e. it has no size, just a charge.
I know, it doesn't sound intuitive, but then the table I'm sitting at mostly consists of vacuum, yet it feels solid when I knock on it.
Thinking about it, if the electron has mass it should also have a size. Ah, screw it, I'm gonna stick with computers and leave particle physics to the experts.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Well, kinda. In common geometrical usage, a sphere is a three dimensional SOLID whose surface is as you described. That's how Euclid used the term, and it's how anybody who studied math to less than college level would use the term. In higher mathematical usage, an n-sphere is an n-dimensional object embedded in an (n+1) dimensional Euclidean space that satisfies the corresponding equation of constant distance from a point in that space. So a circle is a 1-sphere (a one dimensional line embedded in the two dimensional plane); the surface of a ball is a 2-sphere (a two dimensional surface embedded in three dimensional space); and 3-sphere is something you cannot picture because it's a three dimensional "surface" embedded in four dimensional space (and not, as some people mistakenly think, a ball). So if we're going to be strictly pedantic, you could say that the solid body is a sphere [common geometrical usage] or the surface is a 2-sphere [strict mathematical usage], but it's nothing but confusing to define "sphere" the way you did. Normally I'd just shrug and let this go, but since you used the phrase "rather than use math terms that you don't really understand"... In other news, The Pedantic Spheres will be the name of my next band.
They just proved that it was not a not-round shape. That doesn't mean it is round. It seems to me a simpler explanation is that the electron has /no/ shape or structure.
6 Year Study aboard sea vessel confirms earth is in fact round, as Eratosthenes postulated in the second century BC. So round, people will now compare it to other round objects, like the sun. The experiment continues in the search for even greater hand drawn maps, and possibly a trade route to India. The implications for drawers of "There be dragons here!" on map edges could be in danger of full economic collapse.
I8-D
"So round, in fact, that if the electron were enlarged to the size of the solar system, its shape would diverge from a perfect sphere less than the width of a human hair." I'm highly skeptical of the entire article. That measurement would be well under the Planck Length. Below that, isn't all geometry and spatial measurement meaningless? I'm asking, rather than asserting.
Bitchez
"in fact, that if the electron were enlarged to the size of the solar system, its shape would diverge from a perfect sphere less than the width of a human hair. " WOW, that is some really impressive error tolerances on their measurement! What percentage is that?
So, a question to the physics gurus here: what is an electron actually made of? Is the answer simply "matter"? And if so, what is that? Or is this a "turtles all the way down" kinda thing?
Actually anti-electrons (positrons) are SQUARE. As you all know, you can't fit a square peg in a round hole.
a standard Plank Length in the U.S. is 8 feet.
Ok, they talk about how they tell how round it is, but why don't they tell us how they know electrons are red?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
And this means what for our daily lives?
it's a super round charged wave particle with a spin
Only in the sense that a point particle is spherical. The meaning that the article suggested i.e. imagining the electron as an actual spherical charge distribution - say with the classical e radius - is completely misleading.