this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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Electrons (mander.xyz)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Welcome to quantum field theory! There is a single field for every type of particle in the standard model, but electrons are not made of photons.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Not in the current standard model, for sure. Or is there a reason empirically why they simply can't be.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Some properties of the electron are not present in photons, such as the lepton number and the electric charge.

It's possible to create an electron positron pair out of a couple of high energy photons, but that is also true with many other elementary particles.

For a good intuitive introduction to this topic, i suggest Feynman's book QED https://www.amazon.ca/QED-Strange-Theory-Light-Matter/dp/0691164096/

It's a short read, and explains how positrons can be seen as electrons going backwards in time!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That sounds super interesting! Can't read it until I get home (am on vacation at Disneyland right now) but in about a week's time I hope you don't mind if I reply with my updated understanding, and maybe a question or two.

I made a comment a while back (on my alt account) about how the origin of the universe can be expressed as a simple formula: https://sopuli.xyz/comment/3303086

So, I'm curious if that viewpoint will shift at all with a better understanding of electron positron interactions. It kind of makes sense to me that the universe and the antiverse are stacked on top of each other but with time pointing in opposite directions. But I'm sure I'm oversimplifying Feynman's theory and I'll have to read his reasoning to really understand.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

That sounds super interesting!

It is! Although it only deals with the day-to-day working of electromagnetism (quantum electrodynamics), but this explains the working of everything in our current life apart from nuclear power station and fusion in the sun's core.

The text was written before we developed the model for nuclear forces (strong and weak), so it doesn't touch that subject. We know now that sound and weak interactions work in a very similar way to QED, with extension for notre charges.