Electrons In Camera

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You said:
ok, and its isn’t easy to experiment on electrons. But maybe they only seem irrational because you don’t know what they really look like. I’m asking, I suppose if I am to visualize for an experiment that the electron spin is actually an electron spinning, what exactly is the stuff that is moving/spinning and why would it.
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An electron’s spin is the spinning of the particle about its axis, much like a top that is a result of its magnetic moment. Essentially the spin of the electron allows it to couple with another electron and form a bond. However, since electrons are essentially point particles, you would never be able to see an electron spinning. We can deduce spin from radiation studies though (for instance: electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy).
 
inocente said:
Try typing “electron wave function” into google images and you’ll see some computer visualizations of orbital electrons. For example:

Light and Matter: open-source physics textbooks
lightandmatter.com/html_books/lm/ch36/ch36.html

http://www.sciencephoto.com/image/2260/large/A1520210-4fz3_electron_orbital-SPL.jpg
sciencephoto.com/media/2260/enlarge
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Yikes. I’ll try and read it in spare time. But you know the way you think sometimes, if you could just for a while watch the electron visually squirming around through space/time around? a proton which is probably squirming in its own particular way, you could then understand what was happening. Maybe sometime mathematicians will catch on to that idea.
 
You said:
As a wave in what?
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Our four dimensional reality.
Electrons cause perturbations in the wave function of the molecular object in question (like say a chemical bond). So a wave of a set of waves, essentially.
 
Saint_Macarius said:
Our four dimensional reality.
Electrons cause perturbations in the wave function of the molecular object in question (like say a chemical bond). So a wave of a set of waves, essentially.
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ok, so a ‘free’, if there is such a thing, electron would be like a wave/vibration stretched between two other particles…
 
You said:
ok, so a ‘free’, if there is such a thing, electron would be like a wave/vibration stretched between two other particles…
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No, a free electron, it would just be a normal wave function, described as ψ(r, s, t). It would still look like a point particle, but it’s easier to describe an electron by its wave properties when describing how it interacts with other objects.
 
You said:
Maybe I phrased that poorly. Could the electron just be the magnetic field?
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I believe the spin is the source of the magnetic field but truthfully I’m not well educated in these matters, Sorry.
 
Simpleton said:
I believe the spin is the source of the magnetic field but truthfully I’m not well educated in these matters, Sorry.
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You know more than I do. I knew an artist once who said he and another artist sat beside a waterfall to paint it. At the end only one had painted the waterfall the other had just sat and looked at it and said in the end he did not need to paint it because now he understood it.
 
Saint_Macarius said:
Our four dimensional reality.
Electrons cause perturbations in the wave function of the molecular object in question (like say a chemical bond). So a wave of a set of waves, essentially.
Click to expand...
A wave in our four dimensional reality. If I asked what is our four dimensional reality is made of, would it be the same stuff the electron is made of. And what is that, if anything?
 
Look at any scanning electron microscope image and you “see” electrons the exact same way you see photons when you’re reading this right now. An SEM uses electrons to look at stuff instead of light. It is literally an electron camera.

Below is a pretty SEM picture I took :).

As I believe someone else said, we’ll never be able to look directly at an electron because that would violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which says you can’t know the position of an electron exactly. Electrons and all other subatomic particles are “fuzzy”.
 
Luke_K said:
Look at any scanning electron microscope image and you “see” electrons the exact same way you see photons when you’re reading this right now. An SEM uses electrons to look at stuff instead of light. It is literally an electron camera.

Below is a pretty SEM picture I took :).

As I believe someone else said, we’ll never be able to look directly at an electron because that would violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which says you can’t know the position of an electron exactly. Electrons and all other subatomic particles are “fuzzy”.
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Thanks Ed and Luke and all…
Thats right, I thought there were scanning tunneling electron microscopes. Also remember someone working on a film outdoors and they needed a wide angle shot in very misty conditions, I thought I heard them say that the ordinary ‘photon’ cameras were not up to it and they had to get some sort of ‘electron’ camera?!. But thats by the bye.
Maybe I sounded Too literal when I said I wanted to see an electron, I suppose I should have said turn all your equations and formulas and electron properties into either a working drawing [with construction lines] or an animation of the same. The point being that if you know ‘mathematically’ that the equation or whatever you are looking at describes a, e.g. torus shaped magnetic field made of spiraling magnetic field lines through which an electric current is flowing or static in a loop, and at the center is the point particle which then, then, by reason of those things, the electron point particle must have a shape or a topology of a closed loop or whatever it is, to create all of those properties. I mean if an electron is spinning there must be a logical physical reason to sustain a spin. Is that any clearer. And all I’d like is a sketch of an actual electron topology showing all these properties and the reasons for their interacting. Is that too much to ask :), especially since you guys seem to already know the description and shape of it through maths etc. Phew.
 
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what you are trying to do. You are asking essentially, because this is real, I should be able to see it. But it seems you do not recognize that you are bringing macroscopic concepts of “see” to bear where they do not apply.

Consider a basket of apples. Say there are five apples. You can see that. Now consider a basket full of negative two apples. You cannot do it. Yet that number is just as real as five. There are different modes of seeing, and just because you wish to use one mode where only others apply does not mean you will be successful. Sometimes it just cannot be done.

If you question my example, about seeing negative five, note that it can be done – where it actually has meaning. Consider a credit card with a balance, or any debt for that matter. This can be “seen” easily, for the right type of seeing. But note this is a very different type of seeing than that for enumerating apples.
 
manygift1spirit said:
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what you are trying to do. You are asking essentially, because this is real, I should be able to see it. But it seems you do not recognize that you are bringing macroscopic concepts of “see” to bear where they do not apply.

Consider a basket of apples. Say there are five apples. You can see that. Now consider a basket full of negative two apples. You cannot do it. Yet that number is just as real as five. There are different modes of seeing, and just because you wish to use one mode where only others apply does not mean you will be successful. Sometimes it just cannot be done.

If you question my example, about seeing negative five, note that it can be done – where it actually has meaning. Consider a credit card with a balance, or any debt for that matter. This can be “seen” easily, for the right type of seeing. But note this is a very different type of seeing than that for enumerating apples.
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How can I but admit that a basket full of negative two apples does not make sense. But I think my confusion is because of the contradiction of a basket being full with only two apples when before it was full with five apples.
Negative amounts I could visualize is many different ways depending on the shape and dynamics of the system they lived in. They may not exist as real things or they may exist as real only as long as the positive numbers give them shape. A positive number might describe a fold in space/time, a definite shape or form, a negative number might describe its converse effect some other place in the system. I don’t know. Artists are taught to draw the negative spaces not the positive shapes but that is hardly what you mean.
Considering the electron, if it has a magnetic field then isn’t it a result of a twisting [form] of space/time or whatever it is into a definite ‘form’ as opposed to an absence of any form or anything at all?
 
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