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Comment by jpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

Not at all serious but... maybe all electrons have the same mass, charge, etc. because there is only one electron, bouncing backwards and forwards through time. As it passes backwards we see it as the anti-electron (positron). When they meet they annihilate from our perspective, but that's just the electron being reflected and becoming a positron heading backwards.

To be clear this is all not at all consistent with observations - just a fun(?) thought experiment.

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

Out of interest, what observations is this not consistent with?

The argument against is summarized in the Wikipedia article.

Basically it is this:

We measure electrons in different places all the time.

Due to the speed of light it can't instantly move from A to B, so for this to actually be one electron it would have to travel back in time to be at some place at the right time.

However, an electron traveling back in time would appear as a positron, so if that what was going on we should be seeing a fairly equal number of positrons as we do electrons, as the one electron rushes around to appear as an electron where it needs to.

Except we don't, electrons outnumber positrons by a huge margin.

> However, an electron traveling back in time would appear as a positron, so if that what was going on we should be seeing a fairly equal number of positrons as we do electrons, as the one electron rushes around to appear as an electron where it needs to.

What about this part of the article though...?

  "According to Feynman he raised this issue with Wheeler, who speculated that the missing positrons might be hidden within protons."

As noted, the discussion between Wheeler and Feynman was in 1940, long before the development of the Standard Model[1].

In the Standard Model there is a sea of virtual particles in the nucleus, but they're virtual and hence not real in the sense that the positron in the One Electron model would have to be. At least that's my understanding.

Also, electrons can travel over large distances, CRT monitors do that all the time for example. So I'm not entirely sure how Wheeler imagined hiding the positrons in the nucleus would solve the whole positron problem.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark#History

The imbalace in observed particles could come from the fact that we move in the same (time) direction as electrons but the opposite (time) direction of positrons, couldn't it?

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