What Does An Electron ACTUALLY Look Like?

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What does an electron really look like? I mean, if we zoom in all the way. Is it a sizeless speck of charge? Is it a multidimensional vortex of quantum strangeness? Is it the boundary of a tiny universe with universe-electrons of its own? Let’s find out.

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Hosted by Matt O'Dowd
Written by Matt O'Dowd
Post Production by Leonardo Scholzer, Yago Ballarini & Stephanie Faria
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Associate Producer: Bahar Gholipour
Executive Producer: Andrew Kornhaber
Executive in Charge for PBS: Maribel Lopez
Director of Programming for PBS: Gabrielle Ewing
Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: John Campbell

Spacetime is a production of Kornhaber Brown for PBS Digital Studios.
This program is produced by Kornhaber Brown, which is solely responsible for its content.
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[einfisch]

as a chemical engineer, I am frequently thinking about and using the properties of electrons every day to do chemistry. And in general, the properties of these little things are pretty well understood, and we've gotten really good at making them do what we want. And yet, when you start to ask the question "what actually IS it?", all the sudden, the answers we have start to get more and more uncertain and fewer in quantity. Its crazy, the way the universe is just endless layers of complexity in both directions of scale.

[petersage]

I remember an introductory quantum physics lecture from Stanford (I'm pretty sure the series is still up on YouTube): "Electrons don't behave like waves or particles. They behave like electrons." It's a bit of a deepity, but it helps illustrate how unintuitive the quantum world gets.

[theosalmon]

There's a certain trigger that goes off in my head, the moment I perceive, a change in the tonality, of the soothing tone's of Matt's voice, when he inexorably heads toward, that final point, describing to us viewer, something amazing, about spacetime.

[yeeturmcbeetur]

As an electrician, it’s always blown me away at how we as a species have mastered controlling electricity but haven’t scratched the surface of what makes it tick (kind of); the electron.

[Aphasial]

Always enjoy the ability to explore those 20 orders of magnitude or so sitting between our smallest “particle” concepts and the actual Plank length where it all goes awry. The notion that there’s almost the size of a person as compared to a galaxy between what we think of as the smallest chunks and the actual pixel limit implies there’s just that much more we still need to understand about the Universe.

[XuryFromCanada]

I saw one yesterday, it was visibly upset we didn't properly assign it positive charge by convention.

[ozzie_goat]

A police officer pulls over Heisenberg and asks him how fast he was going.

Heisenberg responds, "I know exactly where I am though."

The officer says, "You were going well over 100 miles per hour back there."

Heisenberg throws his hands in the air and yells, "GREAT, NOW I'M LOST!"

[DrDeuteron]

Don't forget, the atomic orbitals we draw are defined in a "fake" coordinate system (reduced mass coordinates), irl the nucleus is also in a "fuzzy" orbital.

[Dark_Jaguar]

This slightly more wholistic look is very much appreciated! I had no idea that the uncertainty principle had to do with the local environment AROUND the particle in question and was a result of increased density of virtual particles.

[jvcscasio]

I wish PBS would put some links for further reading

[kevinlawrence]

I can't believe I've been watching this channel for like 8 years. This was like the first channel I subscribed to when I started watching YouTube 2016-17. It's come quite a long way

[christiandevincent]

As someone who has a fascination with quantum physics and zero actual education in it yet, this is the first time I’ve had any semblance of an understanding of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Thanks for that! 9:29

[Audio_noodle]

I never considered the idea of self annihilation and different scales permitting THAT much different behavior. I'm left wondering how much of this is just theoretical and how much of this is something we have actually measured happening.

[boneladders]

who else heard Schrödinger's cat meowing around 6:03

[mattwinward]

6:03 **Schrödinger's cat meows in the background**

[blazethefaith]

Can electrons really "look" like anything? It seems like asking how wet a molecule of water is: if you try to answer it, you're actually answering a different question.

[johnaweiss]

Has it been proven that a radio transmitter is perturbing an electromagnetic field, and not simply CREATING an electromagnetic field?
3:15 What do you call a "bit of electric charge" which isn't an electron?
4:01 "drag in" -- Wouldn't it be clearer to say "shrink"? We're not controlling your mouse.

[samueldrapeau]

Love the diminished chords in the background music

[GeoffryGifari]

That novium pen looks like a great gift to send someone working in science

[WhitefirePL]

I really like the animations explaining H. uncertainty and that positron screening issue. They are very simple graphically, but spot-on and super helpful for understanding.