Anyone know what keeps the little things stable ?
•Poor energetic photons get themselves raveled into some sort of knot that’s too complex to untie easily ?
•Relatively prime quantum levels for matter vs energy ?
•A stabilizing force that only acts over pointlike distances ?
•A consensus among all electrons to support each others existance ?
I’ve seen explanations for the complex particles, but have never heard a good reason for why electrons don’t go fizzing away into photons at the drop of a hat.
Elementary, my dear Squink. The electron, that is.
Electrons are elementary particles, which means they don’t decay naturally. If you pound one with sufficient energy, or you put it in contact with a positron, it will go away (forming other particles or photons), but it doesn’t just fall apart when left alone.
Electrons are made up of two quarks (up and down, if I recall correctly), and quarks have a binding force that is incredibly strong when you try to separate a bound pair. It takes enormous energy to get them to move far from one anther, which is the reason that quarks remained purely theoretical for quite a while.
You are right Phobos, electrons have no internal structure and are not made up of any other particles. Protons and neutrons are the nuclear particles made up of quarks.
Not to get all up into the Physics of Chemistry “religion”, but there seemed to be a little thing called “Probability Theory” entering into chemistry long about the early 1920’s. See, there were two types of scientists back then, those who believed the probabilistic origins and those who did not. (Incidentally, Einstein didn’t.)
To be VERY breif, teeny-weeny things (scientific term) exist at a specific “location” because that is their most probable location at that time. Electrons are elementary, mostly, according to this theory, because they don’t stay in one place long enough to be bashed apart. Similarly, they don’t spontanneously get all busted up. As stated previously, if you take a poor little electron and set it asea in a wash of “other” particles, going super-fast in the opposite direction, you can get a collision with cool results. This is takes lots of energy and the collision is so rare, that it’s easy to miss. (think Super Conducting Super Collider)
An excellent text, written for the non-geek, is Gary Zukav’s Dancing Wu Li Masters
Baryons (protons and neutrons) are made of three quarks; mesons are made of two quarks each. Electrons are not composed of quarks; they are fundamental particles. Particles can only decay into “lighter” particles. Since charge is conserved and electrons are the lightest particles that carry charge, they cannot decay.
To expand a little further beyond what DrMatrix said, stability is not a requirement for elementarity (is that a word?). For example, muons and Taus are particles similar to electrons, but heavier. Since they’re heavier, they can decay (for example a muon decays into an electron, a muon neutrino, and an electron anit-neutrino). But the muon and tau re still elementary particles.
I picked an electron to ask this question about because it’s an elementary particle lacking internal structure (so far at least).
“Since charge is conserved and electrons are the lightest particles that carry charge, they cannot decay.”
Is charge REALLY conserved, or is it changeable at extremely high temperatures ?
If not don’t we end up with something ugly like e- = mc^2 + charge and a host of others for all the other particle properties ?
So, if I take a bunch of photons, and point them at each other REAL carefully their wave functions might get all tangled up with each other in a way that creates a stable charged particle ?
-The meaning of “tangled” of course is completely up for grabs, and probably means something more like “resonates harmoniously with” rather than “stirred together like two strands of christmas tree lights.”
Since these are just photons getting together, where does the charge come from; the structure of the “knot” ?
Well, I’ve already messed up in this thread, but I’ll try again.
No, you can’t make one charged particle from photons. Since charge is conserved, any uncharged particle that gives rise to a charged one must at the same time create another particle of opposite charge. If there were only two particles created, one of them would also need to be an antiparticle. And the spins would have to add up as well, along with various other conserved values.
Charge is one of only a handful of “conserved” quantities that really is absolutely, totally, in all cases conserved: The others are 4-momentum (which included momentum and energy), angular momentum, magnetic charge (if it exists), and maybe quark color. Any other “conserved” quantity, like strangeness or lepton number, can be changed by tossing it into a black hole, if nothing else, but you can’t get away with that with charge.
So being the minimum possible charge carrier it can’t decay without upsetting the charge balance of the universe. Which brings us to “what’s so special about charge ?”; but that sounds like the beginning of a series with diminishing returns.
-Thanks all.