Can an Electron Be Seen ?

look, you know when you start a game of snooker, right?
The blue on in the middle right?
THAT'S AN ELECTRON
Del

But is it truly like a chunk of whatever ? It could be Green/Blue/Yellow, I don't care. Is it a solid thing. Can an electron be dissected ? A solid blob of goop I find hard to believe.

Nice link - now I can really go bash my head against a wall !

Try these.

Nah, them's beer goggles

'Can an electron be seen?'

Yes.

In so much as 'seeing' equates to detecting photons and inferring qualities off matter with which the photons previously interacted; electrons are what is 'seen' most often.

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However, I doubt smoothness or roundness of an electrons surface is knowable base on 'seeing' light with which it has interacted. I suspect that the figure in what you read is a calculated value based on other observed characteristics.

So does anybody have pics ? Not extrapolated pictures, but a genuine 'here it is, electron' picture ?

An electron in motion, as captured by
a quantum stroboscope.

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Yep, that thing's .0000000000000000000000000001 cm out of round, see?

Could ya take the wrinkly out of focus lens off, I can't see anything...

yep, while in my conversation´s with the Creator I´ve seen something like that!

No "thing" is ever seen. Only the light it emits or reflects, or the effect it has on your awareness. Seeing a thing is not seeing the thing itself but it's signal.

The only exception is to look within...There, you are guaranteed to see yourself directly.

Now the question is, Who sees?

C'mon dude you can't expect a squirrel to be introspective.
On a philosophical level maybe he needs to become the electron.
Del

Sort of I Sing the Body Electron.....,

OMG! That IS a picture of a squirrel!

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For some reason, until you said it, my mind wouldn't sort it out with any confidence.

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I kept arriving at the picture being either:

- A baby orangutang doing some sort of yoga pose.

or

- A pekingese facing the other way that had to go really bad, and someone was finally taking it for a walk.

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I appreciate your keen cat senses.

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(No disrespect intended Kris, the fault is entirely with my eyes and not with your form. As everyone knows, rodents with tail hair are aesthetically pleasing. Now we just need to see about getting tail-toupees for rats and mice)

In the two slit experiment that is exactly what happens when the physicist "sees" an electron in his experiment. But again, the question arises..Who sees?

So we are stuck with wave-particle duality and using whichever 'works' on the math ? In short, we cannot comprehend the true nature of the beast. Via the pic from Lyn I found a boffin to help.

Awareness is the "cause" of the wave-particle duality. Awareness is an interaction between one "thing" (the observed), and another "thing" (the Observer). In quantum physics all interactions are wave functions until the Observer decides otherwise, then a particle is "seen".

If the Observer is looking within to see, then there is an implicit expectation to find some "thing" within the space, because the space itself is implied in the intent to look and the direction of the looking. What it all boils down to is this: The grand Observer is "looking" within itself, and all that is seen there, without exception, is the grand Observer. Even at the same level of experience as God, only the direction of within must yield an experience of any kind, and every thing seen there, no matter how different it might be from the whole, or the last observation, is entirely self.

So, every electron seen by anyone in any lab is the self looking back from within at the Observer. To be a particle is to be there. To see it is to know your inner self to that extent. Space is seen when a wave function is seen. Time is seen when a particle is seen. To see them both is impossible. To be them both is natural.

Has anybody seen my cat? He's in a box around here, soemwhere.

My cat's half in the bag. He's all that and a bag of kibbles when he's not.

Yeah, Kris, that sounds right. Unfortunately, as far as maths explain the quantic behavior of the subatomic world, we use them (predicting the -statistical- behavior of the quantic phenomena in a very accurate way), although we cannot essentially comprehend why it is so. Many attempts have been made by the physicists in order to find a kind of "hiden causality" in the progress of the quantic phenomena but they failed. I think (and I hope) that scientists have not said their 'last word' and -in the future- they'll find out what's really going on. Otherwise, we'll have to admit that nature 'works' in this way, although we can't understand why (and that's what we are doing right now).

Particle physics sounds like some sort of exquisite torture - each discovery leads to yet more questions. Perhaps we are doomed to be left with models that work, but are not the full answer. Some kind of spooky physics that we just cannot comprehend, even though our models provide useful results.

'...Otherwise, we'll have to admit that nature 'works' in this way, although we can't understand why (and that's what we are doing right now)....'

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This truth is not restricted to areas like quantum mechanics. It extends to all attempts at useful models for predicting physical phenomena.

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''Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful'' - George E.P. Box

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Descriptions of 'what's really going on' are just documentation of congruence with previous models which are well accepted (and in being well accepted are commonly mistaken for 'what is really going on' rather than simply the reliably useful models they have proven themselves to be).

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In as much, misunderstanding would be more necessary than discovery for a scientist to conclude they have found 'out what's really going on.'

These miniscule particles are akin to God. They can't be seen but the people who believe in them see signs that prove their existence.

yup stick a 9v battery on your tongue and testify!
Del

Back when I worked at NASA, we had a lab that tried to measure the dispersion of electrons in an electron beam. A powerful visible laser scanned the electron beam and the scattered/reflected photons showed us where the electrons were. Yes, it sounds like tracking BBs with a long wavelength radar, but... Unfortunately our lab was shut down by management, because they had contracted to replace the tile floor. We disassembled everything and packed it away until the contractor finished. It was a long wait, more than a year, PhDs twiddling their thumbs. It seems we were waiting for the contractor to get out of jail.

Just to put numbers to this:

I ordered a bag of electrons (requesting good new ones that had not been knocked around by being part of any atoms). Their sizes were slightly different, one being almost 0,000000000000000000000000002 cm cm larger than the next largest. 6 out of 10 were round to within 0,000000000000000000000000001 cm but four were only round to within 0,0000000000000000000000000015 cm.

So my experiment suggests that most electrons are really very round. My cat said they didn't all taste the same however.

Don't let the cat have too many at once. They'll make him really thirsty. Then he'll throw up on the carpet.

The cat's already pretty annoyed - I've been pulling whiskers and holding them up to the sky. No confirmation of the size comparison yet - there's too much blood streaming streaming down my arms .

I wish I'd known in advance.

At least when my cat pukes, it is a work of art, with his body moving backwards at a rate equal to the extrusion speed. (It's a little like that satisfying feel of getting the caulking gun moving at just the right speed.)

You can't see an electron but you can see how they behave.

They have mass and they bounce like billiard balls so I figure a sphere fits the model pretty well. Nothing's perfect so some figure for imperfection is reasonable to come up with.

Are all electrons as imperfect as each other or are some rounder than others?

Do electrons get dinged up when they collide? Do they chip? Can you have electron dust?

'...and they bounce like billiard balls...'

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That's interesting. Where might I find more information on this phenomena?

If your press your eyeballs hard enough, you'll see all manner of delightful shapes and colors. Do it at night, you won't get light bleeding through your lids. Maybe you'll get to see your electrons. I saw Martha Stewart in a prison birthday suit and couldn't sleep for a week.

Sort of like diapers - it depends.

In classical theory, non-quantum mechanics, it has a radius that is defined as the Lorentz radius, or something like 3 x 10^-15 meters.

However, from a quantum field theory point of view the electron is considered a point source because it is a wave function. Therefore it has no radius.

Now we are treading into some strange domains because quantum theory seems to indicate that all matter is essentially a set of probability waves that only change or "collapse" when observed. The classic two-slit experiment demonstrates this well. It works for photons as well as electrons.

This is the world of superposition. All things exist as probability waves and there is no way to definitely say where a particle is at any one instance. It also explains quantum tunneling effect in electronics.

I am not familiar with the experiment that measures the roundness of an electron, so I can't comment on this.

It's so small it seems to slip through the holes in reality....They are like UFO's over Nevada, you hear about them all the time, a lot of people claim to have seen them, but nobody seems to have a good clear picture that doesn't look like it was photo shopped in some way....