The Reality of the Electron

Azam Mashhadi, Brian E. Woolnough

Wilmot V. Metcalf

Allan Franklin

Discussing the existence of electrons, philosopher of science Ian Hacking has written, “So far as I'm concerned, if you can spray them, then they are real.” He went on to elaborate this view: “We are completely convinced of the reality of electrons when we set out to build—and often enough succeed in building—new kinds of device that use various well-understood causal properties of electrons to interfere in other more hypothetical parts of nature.”

H. Chris Ransford

Our Quantized Reality: Life in the Strobe LightsAlthough we perceive that, generally, everyday life and things are continuous -energy, movement, etc., a bit of scientific analysis of numerous phenomena shows that in many cases it just cannot possibly be so.This realization gave rise a few decades ago to the new science of quantum mechanics.Quantum mechanics has proved so far to be hands down the most successful theory in the history of physics in explaining reality, but it's also by far the weirdest, leading many to question whether this can be the ultimate explanation of reality.Historically, quantum mechanics arose to try and explain how atoms and electrons behave.Matter is made up of atoms, i.e. electrons spinning around nuclei.But how can electrically charged electrons go on spinning, at high speed, without steadily losing energy?According to all the laws of classical physics, electrons ought to slowly wind down as their motion should lead to a never-ceasing leakage of energy.Straightforward calculations in classical physics tell us that they would quickly collapse onto the nucleus -which they obviously do not.Neither human intuition nor classical mechanics can describe nor explain how matter behaves at that level, but quantum mechanics does (25).

Konstantin V. Kazakov