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/sci/ - Science & Math

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5753142 No.5753142 [Reply] [Original]

If an electron is ~1837 times smaller than a proton, then why does it have the same charge as one? Just curiosity at its best...

>> No.5753144

>>5753142
Or curiosity at its worst, depending on how you look at it.

>> No.5753145

because negative is smaller than positive, duh

>> No.5753149

Nikola Tesla invented the electron in 1833. However, Thomas Jefferson stole his work and took the patent for his lightbulb business. In order to convince the public of his own legitimacy, Jefferson retooled Tesla's invention so that the electron had exactly 1/1837th of the mass of a proton - 1837 being the year he published his famous kite flying experiment

>> No.5753154

The proton's charge comes from the quarks in side which are roughly the same size as electrons.

>> No.5753155

>>5753149
>invented electron
Yeah, the universe without electrons was neat.

>> No.5753156
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5753156

>>5753149
i like you

>> No.5753160

>>5753155
anything but neat! without electrons, there could be no roombas

>> No.5753165

>>5753154
Thanks. An answer I understand.

Looking back on it, I actually remember learning this sometime in high school. >>5753155
I know, right? It takes the oldest of oldfags to remember that.

>> No.5753168

>>5753154
Yeah, but quarks have fractional charge.

The real answer is, nobody knows.

>> No.5753176

>>5753165
It's not proven at all though.

>>5753168
That's true, nobody knows.

Still it's neat to consider because they are roughly the same size and the fractional charge adds up, 2/3+2/3-1/3=1. Idk where I'm going with this.

>> No.5753192

>>5753142

Because as a string it is wrapped around the same higher-dimensional hole, just in opposite direction.

>> No.5753196

>>5753176
Electrons and quarks don't really have a "size", though. Electrons are as close to a point particle as we can make out, and it's impossible to have a quark by itself due to color confinement.

>> No.5753198

What about positrons?

>> No.5753203

>>5753196
True, it's more a shared upper limit to what we can expect their sizes to be.

>> No.5753204

To expand on an earlier post, and to copy pasta wikipedia (god forgive me)


p Charge + Size:
A proton is believed to be made up of 3 quarks, two up quarks and one down quark.[1] One down quark has a charge of -1/3, and two up quarks have a charge of +2/3 each. This adds to a charge of +1. The size of a proton is determined by the vibration of the quarks that are in it, and these quarks effectively form a cloud. This means that a proton is not so much a hard ball as an area that contains quarks.

p Mass:
The mass of the proton is about 80–100 times greater than the sum of the rest masses of the quarks that make it up, while the gluons have zero rest mass. The extra energy of the quarks and gluons in a region within a proton, as compared to the rest energy of the quarks alone in the QCD vacuum, accounts for almost 99% of the mass. The rest mass of the proton is, thus, the invariant mass of the system of moving quarks and gluons that make up the particle, and, in such systems, even the energy of massless particles is still measured as part of the rest mass of the system.

Alright, read that. Then consider that electrons are leptons, which for now we consider elementary particles having no substituent parts, so its properties are fixed and we essentially can't agree yet on why they are what they are.

The question of why the masses (sizes) are not the same is answered above (to our knowledge, completely different forms of matter). But to ask why the CHARGES are the same is much trickier, and requires an explanation of the relation between leptons (electron) and hadrons (proton). As you might now be inferring, this is where quantum electrodynamics comes into play, and along with it a whole host of gauge theories that no one on /sci/ is really competent enough to understand, let alone explain.

Try to figure out lie algebra physical theories and QED, but that's really where the answer to your question lies and /sci/'s help ends. (I'd love to be proven wrong)

>> No.5753234

>>5753204
Neat, thanks.