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Obviously, Wheeler was much more knowledgeable about physics than the likes of me, so my obvious objection must have occurred to him, but here it is. Electrons

Obviously, Wheeler was much more knowledgeable about physics than the likes of me, so my obvious objection must have occurred to him, but here it is. Electrons have mass, so the total mass of a multiple electrons must be more than the mass of a single electron. Or is there some other mind-bender that would explain why "the" single electron appears to have a trillion times it real mass when that electron's timeline happens to be considered at a particular slice of space and time? Also, why wouldn't this logic also apply to every other primitive particle: there is only one muon, one tau, one up quark, one down quark, etc?

saurik 3y ago
I never thought I would say this, but... I guess I will recommend you watch the movie Tenet.
Kranar 3y ago
Time travel is required for this thought experiment. The single electron moves forwards and backwards in time so that at any slice of time it can appear at multiple locations simultaneously. Just like a time traveller can go back in time and there would be two of them, this electron travels back and forth in time so that there are numerous instances of it.
- kristjansson 3y ago
  > numerous Yes, numerous
- geon 3y ago
  Also, the electron moving backwards in time would switch the charge and become its antiparticle: a positron. When an electron and a positron meet, they annihilate each other. That could be considered the same single particle switching direction in time.
  - kevindamm 3y ago
    Indeed, that's the classic example given for a Feynman diagram and it shows the presence of a positron and its movement along -t. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram
- klyrs 3y ago
  This all begs the question, what happens to the electrons going into a black hole?
  - GoblinSlayer 3y ago
    They are absorbed by neutronium.
Byamarro 3y ago
If it jumps across the universe uniformly then with each jump it can pull its surroundings as if there would be many electrons. Kind of like a single cpu core can run many programs "in parallel".
coldtea 3y ago
>Or is there some other mind-bender that would explain why "the" single electron appears to have a trillion times it real mass when that electron's timeline happens to be considered at a particular slice of space and time? Wouldn't this be explained by the mass attraction of the electron alone in point A, vs the aggregate attraction of the electron creating a larger "cloud" by being at multiple points (to e.g. form a whole sun)? As long as this "jumping from point to point" is immediate (or much faster than the speed of transmition of gravity attraction due to mass), that would appear as a much higher mass, no?
kazinator 3y ago
If you can go forward and backward in time, you can make your mass appear in multiple places. Your 75 kg (or whatever you are) can appear in NY Times Square, simultaneously with an appearance in Champs-Élysées.
fermisea 3y ago
The thing you should know is that in QFT, the concept of a particle is a bit different. A particle is a localized excitation of a quantum field. A quantum field is like a bucket of water, and a a particle is a bit like a propagating wave that you can create that travels "on the field" but it's "made of the field". A mass of a particle tells you how hard you need to hit the field to create this elementary excitation. And this is where the analogy breaks, since a classical field doesn't have this "quantization" of energy, you can create arbitrarily small waves. Whereas in a quantum field, there's a minimum energy that you need to put to excite it and make an electron show up, and that is the mass. It also acts a bit like the (inverse) width of the wave - the higher the mass the smaller the width and thus the more spacially localized it is. Technically the statement that all electrons are the same is the "correct" one, because technically there's only one "state of the electron field" which is described by a bunch of excitations here and there. So the total mass (or more precisely, the energy state that the field occupies) is actually a huge mess that happens to be easily factorizeable into a bunch of localized states. This is only possible because interactions are extremely weak and thus we can just "sum the electrons". But if all of a sudden the electron charge were to become massive, to the point where electrons would start interacting at much bigger distances, the concept of individual electrons would start to become complicated and we'd need to think about them in some other way (like what happens with quarks and gluons)
scientator 3y ago
>>why wouldn't this logic also apply to every other primitive particle: there is only one muon, one tau, one up quark, one down quark, etc? When Wheeler came up with his idea, antimatter had just been discovered and positrons were the only known form of it at the time. So he was trying to explain why electrons/positrons are so alike, and yet not alike. In other words, just a historical accident that he applied his idea solely to electrons. But yes, as new antimatter particles were subsequently discovered, his idea could be applied to those as well. In fact, if you're a believer in string theory, one could imagine that there's one fundamental string particle that's moving back and forth through time, creating all the other particles as it does so.
- mcphage 3y ago
  > In fact, if you're a believer in string theory, one could imagine that there's one fundamental string particle that's moving back and forth through time, creating all the other particles as it does so. Or take that further, and you get The Egg, by Andy Weir: https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

saurik 3y ago

I never thought I would say this, but... I guess I will recommend you watch the movie Tenet.

Kranar 3y ago

Time travel is required for this thought experiment. The single electron moves forwards and backwards in time so that at any slice of time it can appear at multiple locations simultaneously. Just like a time traveller can go back in time and there would be two of them, this electron travels back and forth in time so that there are numerous instances of it.

kristjansson 3y ago
> numerous Yes, numerous
geon 3y ago
Also, the electron moving backwards in time would switch the charge and become its antiparticle: a positron. When an electron and a positron meet, they annihilate each other. That could be considered the same single particle switching direction in time.
- kevindamm 3y ago
  Indeed, that's the classic example given for a Feynman diagram and it shows the presence of a positron and its movement along -t. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram
klyrs 3y ago
This all begs the question, what happens to the electrons going into a black hole?
- GoblinSlayer 3y ago
  They are absorbed by neutronium.

Byamarro 3y ago

If it jumps across the universe uniformly then with each jump it can pull its surroundings as if there would be many electrons. Kind of like a single cpu core can run many programs "in parallel".

coldtea 3y ago

>Or is there some other mind-bender that would explain why "the" single electron appears to have a trillion times it real mass when that electron's timeline happens to be considered at a particular slice of space and time? Wouldn't this be explained by the mass attraction of the electron alone in point A, vs the aggregate attraction of the electron creating a larger "cloud" by being at multiple points (to e.g. form a whole sun)? As long as this "jumping from point to point" is immediate (or much faster than the speed of transmition of gravity attraction due to mass), that would appear as a much higher mass, no?

kazinator 3y ago

If you can go forward and backward in time, you can make your mass appear in multiple places. Your 75 kg (or whatever you are) can appear in NY Times Square, simultaneously with an appearance in Champs-Élysées.

fermisea 3y ago

The thing you should know is that in QFT, the concept of a particle is a bit different. A particle is a localized excitation of a quantum field. A quantum field is like a bucket of water, and a a particle is a bit like a propagating wave that you can create that travels "on the field" but it's "made of the field". A mass of a particle tells you how hard you need to hit the field to create this elementary excitation. And this is where the analogy breaks, since a classical field doesn't have this "quantization" of energy, you can create arbitrarily small waves. Whereas in a quantum field, there's a minimum energy that you need to put to excite it and make an electron show up, and that is the mass. It also acts a bit like the (inverse) width of the wave - the higher the mass the smaller the width and thus the more spacially localized it is. Technically the statement that all electrons are the same is the "correct" one, because technically there's only one "state of the electron field" which is described by a bunch of excitations here and there. So the total mass (or more precisely, the energy state that the field occupies) is actually a huge mess that happens to be easily factorizeable into a bunch of localized states. This is only possible because interactions are extremely weak and thus we can just "sum the electrons". But if all of a sudden the electron charge were to become massive, to the point where electrons would start interacting at much bigger distances, the concept of individual electrons would start to become complicated and we'd need to think about them in some other way (like what happens with quarks and gluons)

scientator 3y ago

>>why wouldn't this logic also apply to every other primitive particle: there is only one muon, one tau, one up quark, one down quark, etc? When Wheeler came up with his idea, antimatter had just been discovered and positrons were the only known form of it at the time. So he was trying to explain why electrons/positrons are so alike, and yet not alike. In other words, just a historical accident that he applied his idea solely to electrons. But yes, as new antimatter particles were subsequently discovered, his idea could be applied to those as well. In fact, if you're a believer in string theory, one could imagine that there's one fundamental string particle that's moving back and forth through time, creating all the other particles as it does so.

mcphage 3y ago
> In fact, if you're a believer in string theory, one could imagine that there's one fundamental string particle that's moving back and forth through time, creating all the other particles as it does so. Or take that further, and you get The Egg, by Andy Weir: https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html