Electrons Are Near-Perfect Spheres

Excellent observation!

Although after reading the article from The Economist, physicists need electron's cloud shape to be a 'near-perfect' sphere (but never perfect) to comply with the Standard Model of elementary particles.

It's important to emphasize what you said, though: that the experiments still haven't found any "defect" in the shape of the electron's cloud that makes it a non-perfect sphere.

I wonder what HN predicts? I'd say it's a perfect sphere and the Standard Model is wrong. Time will tell...

Link to The Economist article (also in a comment posted below): http://www.economist.com/node/21518365

Wouldn't it require mathematically perfect instruments to even measure/verify a mathematically perfect sphere? A mathematical sphere is simply an infinite set of points: the set of all points a given distance away from some central point.

Note that whether electrons are spherical or not is important to theoretical physics. Right now we do NOT want them to be perfect spheres. But, as you say, our ability to measure this is limited by our instruments.

Keep in mind that many important scientific theories had to wait a very long time until our instruments could reliably measure what was predicted. For example, theories that the earth rotated around the sun were theorized as far back as the 5th Century BC and maybe far before that. Actually proving the Earth rotated around the sun didn't happen until 1728 by measuring aberration in starlight. But what the ancients actually sought, proof by stellar parallax, was far beyond the capabilities of optical instruments until 1854. To be technical, it was actually empirical to believe the sun orbited the earth during this time. Ancients would say "if the earth orbits, I should see stars shift. I do not see stars shifting, therefore the earth does not orbit." Aristotle actually used this very argument!

I was listening to some of the researchers comment on this particular discovery and they are more hopeful about the technique than the findings. There is already talk about improving the resolution a couple of orders of magnitude.

Collectives don't always behave meritocratically, even when composed of people who value meritocracy. I think they probably should, and it's frustrating when they don't, but it's hard to do.

I wonder if it helps to submit when a large number of people are active at HN as opposed to say on a weekend. It seems to me that the sort-order algorithm is based on up-votes and time elapsed since submission. So if a submission is made during off hours, it does not get enough attention or votes, yet the time elapses the same way...

There are voids. A lot of voids. A good deal of matter (even solid) are actually 'nothing'. If you take materials science, you get the 'atoms made of hard ball' approximation of the world (which usually yields pretty good answers), and even then, the densest you can get anything like 75% matter or something. And that's severely high-balling it (the ball radius approximates the electron cloud as a hard continuous shell, when it's really actually mostly just empty.

Strictly speaking, I don't think these things have a 'size' with a border where you can be inside or outside of a lepton 'surface'. Its a basically a point source with a field effect as far as we can determine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_electron_radius

I think the article is saying that the field affect appears to be completely uniform.

Technically, if the electron can affect something at a great distance via gravity or releasing photons you could say the size of an electron is many light years in diameter. Or you could call it infinitesimally tiny.

Neutrons and protons we know to be complicated little parties of quarks and gluons, each of which are, as far as we know, are also elementary particles like leptons.

On microscale it's wrong to think about "in between". There is no in between, there are vacuum, fields (quantized), field state evolution and amplitudes between initial and final states and so on.

"If electrons are spheres and so are protons and neutrons, what type of matter is filling up the area in between?"

In quantum theory, a particle is described as a probability field that fills space. For example, an electron might have a 2.5% chance of being in some little cube of space, a 10% chance in a nearby cube, and so forth. The rules for how it works are called quantum mechanics.

So the particles are fuzzy. They have no defined size, they can overlap with each other, and so forth.

As usual, this research has been simplified to the point of silliness for the popular press. What they probably mean is that a particular electron orbital in a particular type of atom was measured to be spherically symmetric. That means that they went looking for lumpiness of that electron's probability cloud and found to be perfectly smooth and round.

Particle accelerators have already measured this smoothness at high energies. They crash electrons together at high speed, watch how they scatter off each other, and the scattering statistics are consistent with electrons having no internal bits and pieces. They're just smooth, continuous electron all the way through. (Proton collisions scatter as if there are lots of lumpy bits inside. The bits turn out the be quarks and gluons.)

"Can electrons get squished into different shapes depending on arrangement?"

Yes. While electrons can overlap because their borders are fuzzy, they repel each other in the process, changing each other's shapes.

Even just sitting around in an atom, they often start out various funny shapes because they have wavelike properties: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital#Orbitals_table

Protons and neutrons are not spheres exactly. They are made of 3 quarks and have a structure.

Electrons are point particles - they are true 0 dimensional objects - they have no size at all. However they do have an equivalent wavelength due to their mass, and they have an area of influence.

Are you sure it isn't this:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=width+of+human+hair+%2F...