What is an Electron?
Most recent answer: 10/28/2016
Q:
What do we mean by AN electron? Some answered, that it is an excitation-wave in the electron field, but we also say that it is a collapsing of a wave function.So what is the "thing"that is traveling before we collapse the wave function? Sea of possibility? Is a moving electron not an electron?
- Lap (age 14)
Leamington Spa
- Lap (age 14)
Leamington Spa
A:
At some level, we don't know and people's speculations disagree. Saying that it is an excitation of the electron field is a pretty good answer, however. As for "wave function collapse" we don't know whether any such process occurs. The cartoon picture that students often hear about "collapse" leading to an electron "at a point" is certainly false.The local quantum state decoheres into parts that may be more localized than the initial state, but a state localized at a point would have infinite energy. Whether at some point there's a collapse gets into the whole murky question of quantum interpretation, on which we have many murky answers.
Mike W.
(published on 10/28/2016)