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Truth be told, we don't really know that electrons are singularities in the EM field. Classically that's the case, of course. But in QFT, as you start to prob

Truth be told, we don't really know that electrons are singularities in the EM field. Classically that's the case, of course. But in QFT, as you start to probe to shorter distances (and higher energies), our theories eventually break down because gravitational effects cannot be ignored. (For instance, how do you describe the EM field at distances shorter than a Planck length? The energies needed to probe to that limit would collapse the system into a black hole.)

Jensson 2y ago
> Truth be told, we don't really know that electrons are singularities in the EM field We do know they aren't such singularities. QFT says they aren't, the electron is a quantum field spread out over an area it isn't a point particle. QFT is the most well tested theory in existence, so if we can't call that "know" then we don't know anything at all in physics. What we don't know if whether there is limit to how small that quantum field can get, but we do know it can't become a point, due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that states that for a particle to be a point it would have to have infinite momentum. Note: Heisenberg uncertainty principle was named at the time when people still believed quantum fields were probability distributions, but since then we have established that the quantum field is the particle and not just a probability of where the particle is. That means the Heisenberg uncertainty principle establishes a relationship between momentum and size instead of just knowledge.