Re: The Electron

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>]

At 14:30:35 -0500 11/13/03, J. Green wrote:

> I'm not trying to prove or disprove the exclusion principle.  My intent was
> SPECIFICALLY to stay away from the exclusion principle.  I just want to try
> to understand the electron itself, and this thread has gotten off that
> subject.  If we could return, that would be nice.

Sorry, but if you want to understand the electron, it has to be in
terms of its interactions with other matter (including other
electrons), and for that, due to the observed property of electron
spin, the exclusion principle is essential. Pauli understood this
even before Schroedinger and Heisenberg  invented their equations.

You earlier asked if the electron had any intrinsic structure, and
the answer is that we don't know for sure, but there is at present no
evidence that there is any, and, at least as deeply as we have been
able to probe, there is evidence that it doesn't, so the current
theories are built on the assumption that it doesn't. But that may
change if, as was earlier found with protons and neutrons that they
have some charge distribution within some outer "boundary." It was
that finding, by Hofstader and others about 40 years ago, that, in
part, led to our present understanding of nucleon structure.

You also assert that the reactivity of hydrogen, vis a vis, helium
was due only to its proton number. That is patently not true. Without
the Pauli principle, the electrons in an atom would not have to
cluster in "shells," roughly arranged according to their energy, and
the relative inactivity of helium is due to its "shell" of electrons
being "filled" in accordance with the exclusion principle, while, in
hydrogen, that same shell is "unfilled" leaving lots of possibilities
for hydrogen to interact with other atoms, including other hydrogen
atoms.

We also know, about electrons, that they cannot exist as separate
entities within the nucleus (except when "passing through" and not in
any nuclear bound state), and yet during radioactive beta-decay,
energetic electrons are ejected from the nucleus, which implies that
they are "created" at the moment of decay, by some process that takes
place in connection with neutrons. But it is clear that neutrons are
not just more tightly bound states of protons and electrons than are
found with hydrogen atoms. There is all sorts of both experimental
and theoretical evidence against that possibility.

We also know that electrons have "anti-electrons," called "positrons"
that behave just like electrons except that their charge is the
opposite. When an electron comes into the vicinity of a positron, the
two can momentarily form a little atomic object, called "positronium"
that behaves, spectroscopically, just like a hydrogen atom, but with
a very tiny mass nucleus, so that instead of the electron "orbiting"
the proton, the electron and positron are more properly thought of as
in orbit about each other, and the spectrum looks like hydrogen but
with the electron mass appearing to be about half what it is seen to
be when bound in a hydrogen atom. The condition lasts only for a few
microseconds, however, because the two, positron and electron,
quickly annihilate each other, creating a gamma-ray photon or two in
the process.

So we know quite a lot about the electron, or at least about our
models of the electron (and we can do no better than know about our
models), but everything we know about them comes from our study of
their interactions with each other and with other matter. The
exclusion principle is an vitally important factor in those
interactions, and simply cannot be ignored as "some guy's theory."
Without it we simply would not exist to even be able to think about
it.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
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<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

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