Quotes About Electron

The old debate between mind and matter is fast becoming as antiquated as a debate about the relative merits of various sorts of fountain pens. "Matter" is going out of style. The electron is turning out to be the Cartesian "pineal gland" which mediates in the obsolete opposition of mind and matter as the lines between these two antagonists in the ancient dualism are blurred by the electronic revolution.

Supersymmetry is a theory which stipulates that for every known particle there should be a partner particle. For instance, the electron should be paired with a supersymmetric 'selectron,' quarks ought to have 'squark' partners, and so on.

We have learnt through experience that when an electrical ray strikes the surface of an atom, an electron, and in some circumstances a second and even a third electron, can be detached.

I can't think of myself, my body, sometimes, without seeing the skeleton: how I must appear to an electron. A cradle of life, made of bones; and within, hazards, warped proteins, bad crystals jagged as glass.

Sir Arthur Eddington summed up the situation brilliantly in his book The Nature of the Physical World, published in 1929. "No familiar conceptions can be woven around the electron," he said, and our best description of the atom boils down to "something unknown is doing we don't know what".

In physics we have outgrown archer and apple-pie definitions of the fundamental symbols. To a request to explain what an electron really is supposed to be we can only answer, "It is part of the A B C of physics". The external world of physics has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions.

salt by definition is a compound created by the neutralization of an acid and a base. Both are extremely unstable—one because it lacks an electron and the other because it has an extra one. So they are, like a good marriage, attracted to each other because they solve each other's problem, complete each other, and result in an extremely stable compound.

As Sommerfeld said in his famous text "Spectral Lines and Atomic Constitution," on which a generation of physicists learned the subject, "In the fine structure constant e is the representative of the electron theory, h the appropriate representative of the quantum theory, c comes from relativity and characterizes it in contrast to classical theory.

We had to understand things like why the top quark was so heavy and the electron is so light. The Higgs is a big, important step.

Albert Szent-Györgyi, a Hungarian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1937 for the discovery of vitamin C, once offered the opinion that "life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.

It also predicted that the electron should have a partner: an antielectron, or positron. The discovery of the positron in 1932 confirmed Dirac's theory and led to his being awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1933.

The best we can do is to predict the probability of seeing the electron in any particular location or with any particular velocity.

Utterly wrong, according to the AQM way of thinking. It comes from a stubborn insistence on thinking of an electron as a tiny classical dot zipping around inside of the wave function, rather than the electron actually being the wave function.

Dirac's equation not only accounted for the spin of the electron and its observed magnetic moment, but also correctly explained the fine structure of the hydrogen atom. If the derivation of the Sommerfeld-like formula for the spectrum of the hydrogen atom was one of the striking successes of the Dirac equation, some of its other features were very troublesome.

One may feel inclined to say that Thomson, the father, was awarded the Nobel Prize for having shown that electron is a particle, and Thomson, the son, for having shown that electron is a wave.

The magnetic cleavage of the spectral lines is dependent on the size of the charge of the electron, or, more accurately, on the ratio between the mass and the charge of the electron.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that the electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves.

According to the new theory, an electron moving between orbits would disappear from one and reappear instantaneously in another without visiting the space between

the strange behavior of the electron. The principal problem they faced was that the electron sometimes behaved like a particle and sometimes like a wave.

The uncertainty around which the theory is built is that we can know the path an electron takes as it moves through a space or we can know where it is at a given instant, but we cannot know both.

In other words, the process of observation determines the final state of the electron.

It is also possible to carve atomic devices using electron beams. For example, scientists at Cornell University have made the world's smallest guitar, one that is twenty times smaller than a human hair, carved out of crystalline silicon. It has six strings, each one hundred atoms thick, and the strings can be plucked using an atomic force microscope. (This guitar will actually play music, but the frequencies it produces are well above the range of the human ear.)

To resolve the discrepancy between waves of probability and our commonsense notion of existence, Bohr and Heisenberg assumed that after a measurement is made by an outside observer, the wave function magically "collapses," and the electron falls into a definite state—that is, after looking at the tree, we see that it is truly standing. In other words, the process of observation determines the final state of the electron. Observation is vital to existence.

E]ven laws of Nature are not absolutely certain. There may be new circumstances never before examined – inside black holes, say, or within the electron, or close to the speed of light – where even our vaunted laws of Nature break down and, however valid they may be in ordinary circumstances, need correction.