Electrons Pave The Way To Quantum Riddles.

          The Atomic Entity.

          Edited 9th Sept 09. to make it much easier to understand.

 Most of us know that electrons are  very small entities that are associated with an atom. When most of us think about atoms we picture the smallest of particles that we would see if we could magnify something to the point where we are looking right down into into the very substance of the item. The minuscule things that give an item its mass and chemical makeup.

Can’t we just magnify them?

Unfortunately, there isn’t an optical microscope that’s up to the job, so no-one, including the worlds best scientists have ever actually seen an isolated atom in any detail, let alone an electron. I took an interest in this subject after reading an item in wikipedia which tried to explain in very techno language what an electron is and how it behaves. It really is mind bending stuff trying to get your head around statements that say particles are not particles but waves that can act like particles. Particles of what? Waves of what? Clearly they are some form of energy but what type of energy, Energy comes in a variety of forms. Can we make an analogy here to try make sense of this puzzling situation.

In  The Macro World Mass Can Have Different Forms.

Can we compare it with other substances that we are more familiar with, something like water for instance. We all know that water has three forms here on Earth depending on its temperature,

1. at sea level below 0°C it’s a solid

2. above 0°C and below 100°C it’s liquid.

3.above 100°C it’s a vapour or gas.

When the temperature cools from 100°C it condenses or materializes into water vapour then water droplets, if the temperature falls below 0°C it reforms into it’s natural stable state, ice, a solid.

Ice being less dense than liquid water floats at the surface, imagine the smallest piece of ice, say a molecule was floating in the vast expanse of water. You know it’s there but need to see it, to see it you employ some other means like a microscope. You will see nothing, ever, because the very act of looking at it with light, introducing light energy will make it melt into the vast sea of liquid water. Then you surmise that it isn’t there and it is there, it is nowhere and everywhere it is a particle and a wave. As soon as you stop looking, it reforms and enjoys it existence until you look at it again.

What The Eye Cannot See The Mind Can Imagine.

These are parameters we all know because we evolved to survive on this planet with only the senses we have and can witness them. Could  there be another set of parameters we can only imagine in the micro world of quantum, where energy, depending on which of those parameters it’s being influenced by will take certain definite forms like electricity, magnetism, kinetic energy, mass energy, potential energy etc. I mean if we listen to the eggheads space itself is expanding and to my logic that gives it  the substance that a simple vacuum does not have. Could it be yet another form of energy?  

Mass = Frozen Energy.

The electron is a wave but at times it acts like a particle depending on the parameters you are analysing it by. I know from the laws of probability and logic that there are parameters at work here that we haven’t got the information to even begin to understand, yet. The fabric of space is the basic medium and everything in existence has tapped into it, e=mc² is an equation dreamed up by one of the most imaginative and brilliant minds ever to have graced this planet, Albert Einstein realised that energy, mass and the speed of light are very tightly interwoven. Energy, Mass and Acceleration are all different forms of the same thing.

(Update to this post 24th Sept.09)  Einstein was close with his equasion but it had a flaw, this is fully explained in depth by Al Zeeper at einsteingravity.com

This to my mind proves that space is indeed energy and explains something that has puzzled me for years, thanks Mr Zeeper. 

A Closer Look At The Atom.  

The Orbitals.

 When you look at the above graphic representation of an atom it’s plain to see that the electron occupies a certain zone depending on it’s density and the kinetic energy it is carrying.  The mass + kinetic energy add up and determine where it will float in the atmosphere of spacial energy (another form of energy more dense nearer the surface of the atom) around the atom. Electrons carrying less kinetic energy will occupy the next level out and so on until the distance from the atom is such that the atoms energy level will be too weak to capture more electrons.

The Pave Is Born.

At this point calling an electron an electron is misleading, it gives the impression that it’s a little ball of energy circling the atom and knowing what we already have figured out it is neither a ball of energy or a wave of energy, it is fluid and both. I suggest we call it a ”PAVE” and that the orbitals are “PAVE ZONES”. 1 pave plus it’s kinetic energy (pave+spin+velocity+centrifugal energy= its “total mass”) determining it’s position in the layers of pave zones. Only 2 paves can occupy the 1st pave zone because of the parameters determining their entity. If another pave comes along something has to give because three paves cannot occupy the first pave zone, so the intruding pave loses some of its ”total mass” energy to the original 2 paves occupying pave zone 1 and is forced to occupy pave zone 2. The extra kinetic energy taken on by the first two paves is thrown out in spin to the pave zone. The nature of kinetic energy is that it is passed on readily, it could be that the intruder takes kinetic energy from one of the paves in pave zone 1 thus displacing it and sending the less massive pave into pave zone 2. If a pave in zone 1  becomes too massive it has to release some of its “total mass” into pave zone 1 which by quantum standards is a vast ocean of spacial energy, the effect to the pave zone being negligible (It could be that even if the pave zone does become too saturated with spacial energy that it squeezes or condenses another pave into existence forcing other paves into other places in the pave zone hierarchy possibly causing a pave to be ejected from the system, thus restoring the order from the chaos it briefly created).

 Understanding The Pave Quantum Energy Unit.

This is where the mind needs to bend to try and understand the physical nature of this little sub atomic particle. From what I’ve read, this pave has no known substructure and they are always identical, it carries a positive electrical charge and within it’s orbital it is nowhere and everywhere. It is neither a particle nor a wave and it is both or each. It is termed a point charge or point particle. It has a mass that is approximately 1836 times less than a proton and contributes less than 0.06%  to an atoms total mass.

I hope you have enjoyed this humorous foray into one of the cosmos’s greatest enigmas. The electron with a little imagination can easily be understood once you realise it is only another energy entity, the PAVE.

This is sidewallfusion signing off until next time, when I will deal with another of the worlds greastest puzzles. 

Next post: Why did the human race evolve a brain that is far larger than is neccessary for its survival on planet Earth.