rynner2 said:
Cochise said:
I ask as a humble enquirer, having revealed that I know next-to-nothing about the subject, but I thought I read somewhere that the idea of the electron as an actual particle was really a convention, and that it was more like a 'shell' or 'ring' around the nucleus which was not anywhere solid? In other words thinking of it as a particle orbiting so quickly that you could never say where it was provided an easier way of visualising it?
Yes, as I said elsewhere (and quite recently), our brains did not evolve to handle quantum stuff (and that's the realm we're in with atoms and their constituent 'particles'). This is because, at this level, things have a wave-particle duality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave%E2%80 ... le_duality
The best we can do at visualising what 'really' goes on is to choose whatever aspect best suits the situation we're looking at. Sometimes an electron is like a particle, other times it's more like a wave. The Wiki page covers it in some depth, so there's no point me repeating it all here.
My specialty is database access, data retrieval, indexing etc. So I spend my day with abstract structures in my head. It's normal for me to be thinking of things that have more dimensions than we can physically percieve. Although the brain aches the first time you grasp the concept, you become used to it.
My own main product uses a concept best described as a pyramid with 0-254 faces situated within an n-dimensional matrix, with the current record as the apex of the pyramid. This of course is another approximation - indeed quite a drastic simplification - and I simplify it still further when describing it to customers.
So I can easily visualise a nucleus surrounded by a series of semi-permeable shells, each with a fixed number of slots. Its fine to use such approximations as long as everyone stays aware that's what they are.
Returning to normal transmissions.
From the description, an electron isn't a particle or a wave. Even though it partakes of some chacteristics of both. It would therefore seem obvious to me that it should have a new name for the type of object it is (I'm creating new programmatic objects all the time).
Why invent the whole particle-wave duality conundrum? You just need a new class of object that partakes of both particle and wave characteristics and maybe has some added bonus stuff of its own, plus one restriction - it only exists at a sub-atomic level.
Clearly sub-atomic physicists have no problem inventing names for specific things (Quark, Strangeness and Charm
), they just need to define a class they belong to.
I don't blame Einstein per se. I blame the hubris that physicist and other scientists acquired after realising that they had something that no one else understood. (it later transpired that they didn't understand it after all - no one did.)
