The electromagnetic properties are the shape in the only sense that anyone ever really uses the word shape. So its shape is round.
When physicists talk amongst each other and refer to the electron having a round shape they will exactly mean and understand what you stated. I don't take any issue with that shorthand in a published article abstract or title.
But I think the confusion in this/. thread is testament to the fact that if you have a popular science article using this phrasing accompanied with a blue billiard ball picture this is not what a more or less informed public will perceive.
Communicating the peculiarities of QM to the public is a daunting task. We don't know with certainty if an isolated electron is indeed a point particle (in the physical sense) or has an actual spatial charge distribution above the Plank length (although I don't like the latter assumption because it adds complexity and a hidden variable:-)
What we know for certain is that the electron is "not from this world" i.e. the macroscopic world of cause and effect.It behaves for the most part like anything but a blue billiard ball. Yet, this poorly written and illustrated dailyscience.com article inadvertently reinforces this misconception. IMHO the somewhat mysterious point particle image does a much better job a conveying to the unsuspecting public that we are in fact dealing with a very different realm when describing the humble electron.
Not that good popular science writing comes easy. Translating science to prose is always fraught with danger. "Lies to children" is how Terry Pratchett so aptly called it in what I consider the best popular science book. In this regard I think the point partical image works very well because the mathematical point is an abstraction that everybody is familiar with and kids learn very early about (my 6 year old learned about 3d shapes and 2d in kindergarten. He then asked me about 1d shapes and concluded that there is only one).
Piss poor pop science writing is a pet peeve of mine (the current state of theoretical physics doesn't help in this regard). So the dailyscience.com write-up and even worse/. summary rubbed me all the wrong way.
Your experimental work is quite impressive and I am looking forward to the the further refinement and zeroing in on the elusive electron dipole moment. It deserves the limelight and attention that it gets.
Not sure how much control or influence you have on the treatment that your work gets on popular science sites like dailyscience.com but if you can influence them I urge you to include appropriate caveats in their write-ups to not get people stuck on the image of an electron as blue billiard ball.
A point in physics is not the same as an idealized mathematical point. Point particle means it physical attributes live on the scale of the Plank length. Of course you are free to imagine the electron as a classical ball of charge but there are good reasons why physicist tend to no longer cling to that picture. It doesn't make sense to imagine a differentiated shape on a scale where space itself does not have a sub structure anymore.
Having a ball shape means that you have a cross section that you can actually probe - but that is exactly what is missing for point particles (and not for lack of trying).
In the context of the article the whole thing gets even more convoluted because the measurement was done on bound electrons in a molecule. These electrons are not localized and rather represent a charge distribution in a molecular orbital. It is the electrons charge that make the orbitals. Of course the latter themselves have higher order electric moments and all that was determined by the 10 years data gathering is that no intrinsic electron dipole moment contributes to them.
What probably happened is that the scientists tried to illustrate the incredible precision of their measurements by illustrating what that'll translate to for a classical charge distribution.
The author of the article who apparently didn't pay as much attention in high school as you did just ran with it and mistook the analogy for the real thing describing the electron as a perfect sphere.
Most current theories assume a tiny electron dipole moment and that's what motivates this slow motion goose chase.
This is why this article is so ludicrous. Current understanding is that the electron doesn't have a structure and is a elementary particle with intrinsic spin. I.e. it is a point particle.
Within the precision of their measurements they did not find any higher order electric moments. If they did it'll hint at a sub structure and that'll be a rather major discovery.
This is good science but a terribly written article.
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.
Blaming Bush Jr on having the urge to get rid of Saddam.
Don't blame him at all for that urge. That urge was fully justified and I shared it.
I blame him for the amateurish diplomacy, lackluster coalition building and too few boots on the ground when he finally moved in.
It was not the right time to act on Iraq. He wasn't able to establish a unified Western coalition like his father did. No new solid security council resolution. And then when he moved in regardless his administration completely underestimated the resources needed for a successful occupation.
He shouldn't have done it in the first place and then he didn't even do it right.
Sometimes you have to bid your time and don't give into your urges. But for Gaddafi the time is nay.
IMHO the truly international effort against Gaddafi is fully justified. It's a large diverse alliance with solid diplomatic backing. Same holds for when Bush the elder led an alliance to kick out Saddam's forces from Kuwait. Bush Jr's Iraq endeavorer on the other hand was misbegotten and ill conceived from the get go.
Yep, the US is in Afghanistan because of "Osama Bin Laden and the Taleban".
What's your point? 9/11 made the intervention just a foregone conclusion and then the monomaniacs in the White House dropped the ball when they thought Iraq was an easy and more juicy target. They were fully vindicated in their assumption that it'll be easy to sell to the US public and entirely wrong in assuming it'll be a military cakewalk.
Weapons inspectors have been Iraq up until the last war started.
To quote from wikipedia:
During the lead-up to war in March 2003, Hans Blix had found no stockpiles of WMD and had made significant progress toward resolving open issues of disarmament noting "proactive" but not always the "immediate" Iraqi cooperation as called for by UN Security Council Resolution 1441. He concluded that it would take âoebut monthsâ to resolve the key remaining disarmament tasks.[4]
To compare this truly international effort with regards to Libya with the war of aggression against Iraq is nothing but convenient revisionism.
Your argument is ironic because it basically makes the case that the US should have moved earlier against Saddam.
At any rate Qaddafi had the Chad to play with and to commit his atrocities. Added bonus for him this country was so poor and unimportant that absolutely nobody paid attention.
Slashdot Mirror
Geez, this site is getting old. Feel the optimism. The all American 'yes we can' spirit.
And now get off my lawn, punk!
Thanks! Made my day.
When physicists talk amongst each other and refer to the electron having a round shape they will exactly mean and understand what you stated. I don't take any issue with that shorthand in a published article abstract or title.
But I think the confusion in this /. thread is testament to the fact that if you have a popular science article using this phrasing accompanied with a blue billiard ball picture this is not what a more or less informed public will perceive.
Communicating the peculiarities of QM to the public is a daunting task. We don't know with certainty if an isolated electron is indeed a point particle (in the physical sense) or has an actual spatial charge distribution above the Plank length (although I don't like the latter assumption because it adds complexity and a hidden variable :-)
What we know for certain is that the electron is "not from this world" i.e. the macroscopic world of cause and effect.It behaves for the most part like anything but a blue billiard ball. Yet, this poorly written and illustrated dailyscience.com article inadvertently reinforces this misconception. IMHO the somewhat mysterious point particle image does a much better job a conveying to the unsuspecting public that we are in fact dealing with a very different realm when describing the humble electron.
Not that good popular science writing comes easy. Translating science to prose is always fraught with danger. "Lies to children" is how Terry Pratchett so aptly called it in what I consider the best popular science book. In this regard I think the point partical image works very well because the mathematical point is an abstraction that everybody is familiar with and kids learn very early about (my 6 year old learned about 3d shapes and 2d in kindergarten. He then asked me about 1d shapes and concluded that there is only one).
Piss poor pop science writing is a pet peeve of mine (the current state of theoretical physics doesn't help in this regard). So the dailyscience.com write-up and even worse /. summary rubbed me all the wrong way.
Your experimental work is quite impressive and I am looking forward to the the further refinement and zeroing in on the elusive electron dipole moment. It deserves the limelight and attention that it gets.
Not sure how much control or influence you have on the treatment that your work gets on popular science sites like dailyscience.com but if you can influence them I urge you to include appropriate caveats in their write-ups to not get people stuck on the image of an electron as blue billiard ball.
Do it for the children! :-)
A point in physics is not the same as an idealized mathematical point. Point particle means it physical attributes live on the scale of the Plank length. Of course you are free to imagine the electron as a classical ball of charge but there are good reasons why physicist tend to no longer cling to that picture. It doesn't make sense to imagine a differentiated shape on a scale where space itself does not have a sub structure anymore.
Having a ball shape means that you have a cross section that you can actually probe - but that is exactly what is missing for point particles (and not for lack of trying).
In the context of the article the whole thing gets even more convoluted because the measurement was done on bound electrons in a molecule. These electrons are not localized and rather represent a charge distribution in a molecular orbital. It is the electrons charge that make the orbitals. Of course the latter themselves have higher order electric moments and all that was determined by the 10 years data gathering is that no intrinsic electron dipole moment contributes to them.
What probably happened is that the scientists tried to illustrate the incredible precision of their measurements by illustrating what that'll translate to for a classical charge distribution.
The author of the article who apparently didn't pay as much attention in high school as you did just ran with it and mistook the analogy for the real thing describing the electron as a perfect sphere.
Most current theories assume a tiny electron dipole moment and that's what motivates this slow motion goose chase.
If the electron had a dipole moment that'll either mean if has a sub-structure or it'll be the first point particle observed to have a dipole moment.
I am pretty disenchanted with the state of theoretical physics these days and I don't have much faith in any particular prediction.
Especially since the implications are pretty pro-found. It'll mean that parity invariance and time reversal invariance no longer hold.
So I am not holding my breath expecting an elementary electric dipole to be found any time.
This is why this article is so ludicrous. Current understanding is that the electron doesn't have a structure and is a elementary particle with intrinsic spin. I.e. it is a point particle.
Within the precision of their measurements they did not find any higher order electric moments. If they did it'll hint at a sub structure and that'll be a rather major discovery.
This is good science but a terribly written article.
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.
Thanks for clearing this up.
I have a master of physics but skimming through the article I could not make heads or tail of what these guys actually measured.
Extrapolating from the dipole moment to the headline that the electron is perfectly spherical is just cringe-worthy.
To my knowledge there is hardly any anti-nuclear power sentiment in Japan.
If they wanted they could have replaced these aging reactors with new ones long ago.
Blaming Bush Jr on having the urge to get rid of Saddam.
Don't blame him at all for that urge. That urge was fully justified and I shared it.
I blame him for the amateurish diplomacy, lackluster coalition building and too few boots on the ground when he finally moved in.
It was not the right time to act on Iraq. He wasn't able to establish a unified Western coalition like his father did. No new solid security council resolution. And then when he moved in regardless his administration completely underestimated the resources needed for a successful occupation.
He shouldn't have done it in the first place and then he didn't even do it right.
Sometimes you have to bid your time and don't give into your urges. But for Gaddafi the time is nay.
You seem to confuse me with a knee-jerk pacifist.
IMHO the truly international effort against Gaddafi is fully justified. It's a large diverse alliance with solid diplomatic backing. Same holds for when Bush the elder led an alliance to kick out Saddam's forces from Kuwait. Bush Jr's Iraq endeavorer on the other hand was misbegotten and ill conceived from the get go.
hate-fest ?
Speak for yourself. I am mostly saddened by this history. A regrettable and preventable loss of live and so much unnecessary suffering .
Americans in general are so uniformed the PR doesn't even have to be very clever or otherwise Fox News wouldn't work.
BTW, just as a disclaimer: I lived for a while in the US but now in Canada and was born in Germany.
Yep, the US is in Afghanistan because of "Osama Bin Laden and the Taleban".
What's your point? 9/11 made the intervention just a foregone conclusion and then the monomaniacs in the White House dropped the ball when they thought Iraq was an easy and more juicy target. They were fully vindicated in their assumption that it'll be easy to sell to the US public and entirely wrong in assuming it'll be a military cakewalk.
Just as in Vietnam the death-toll was nevertheless considerable.
Weapons inspectors have been Iraq up until the last war started.
To quote from wikipedia:
To compare this truly international effort with regards to Libya with the war of aggression against Iraq is nothing but convenient revisionism.
You forgot Canada.
The success of the Egyptian uprising was not guaranteed until the military eventually sided with the protesters.
This is like arguing that because the Myanmar army was able to squash peaceful protests that obviously a majority is supporting the junta.
An absurd stance.
And you would be wrong.
"40 years ago" It was the same man running that coiuntry i.e. Muammar Gaddafi.
Au contrair, mon ami.
Indeed that'll be silly.
It is a good day when economic interests, international diplomacy and noble motives align once in a while.
This seems to be one of those rare occasions. (The last time we had such a constellation was the campaign to stop the Serbian incursion into Bosnia).
Your argument is ironic because it basically makes the case that the US should have moved earlier against Saddam.
At any rate Qaddafi had the Chad to play with and to commit his atrocities. Added bonus for him this country was so poor and unimportant that absolutely nobody paid attention.
It is pretty established fact that Muammar Qaddafi sponsored the Lockerbie bombing
He also order a terrorist attack on a disco in Berlin
The Bush administration tried desperately to prove a connection between international terrorism and Saddam but could not.
What is you contention that Saddam was worse than Qaddafi based on?
OK, how about Bosnia then?