Electron particle's shape revealed (physics, system, comparison, rant)
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"But now physicist Jony Hudson of Imperial College London and his colleagues have analyzed the shape of the electron in unprecedented detail and found it to be as much a perfect sphere as can be measured, down to less than a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a billionth of a centimeter."
"But now physicist Jony Hudson of Imperial College London and his colleagues have analyzed the shape of the electron in unprecedented detail and found it to be as much a perfect sphere as can be measured, down to less than a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a billionth of a centimeter."
"Supersymmetry suggests electrons may in fact be egg-shaped, but Hudson's research appears to throw a wrench in those works. The experiment doesn't necessarily disprove the theory, though, just that if electrons are egg-shaped, it's at a scale even smaller than this one could probe."
It was predicted to be egg-shaped, and that's still a possibility, but the experiment shows it to be as perfectly spherical as can be determined at the present time. An interesting comparison was that if you could expand an electron to the size of the entire solar system, the deviation of roundness would be less than the width of a human hair.
That is amazing. I wonder about other particles. I bet they have similar spherical shapes that would be similar to electrons.
They might be very similar if they can be examined at the same scale as the electrons. It would be interesting to find out. In particular, I'd be very curious about the shape of photons. Again, it's still possible there could be some deviation in roundness at much smaller scales. At a wild guess, I'd think that at even deeper scales of precision, the "surface" of electrons and other particles might be rather vibrant and lumpy, as opposed to being perfectly smooth.
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So is it a particle or a tiny wave front in a spherical shape?
