Quantumology
  • Home
  • The Book
  • Blog
  • Lambda
  • Invisibles
  • NNN17

Electron - The Dark Contender?

12/29/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
Some things about the Dark seem to be pretty transparent. The things we find in it often turn out to be pretty ambiguous, and those ambiguities depend on our point of view. When we resolve an argument, we tend to have reached a compromise of sorts based on acceptance that neither view has absolute power over the other. Usually we've no idea what is at the root of the argument until we reach this point of ambiguity. We then find the answer was embarrassingly straightforward and wonder why we wasted so much time in reaching the most obvious conclusions. 

Electrons are very famous particles. Partly because they scoff the limelight at every available opportunity.
"Want a new scientific advancement?" they shriek. "Look at me! Me, me! Over HERE!"
and obligingly the scientist carries out his experiment, or makes his prototype, and finds electrons at the front of the stage putting on a tremendous show of unearthly capabilities. Here are a few examples:

The Double Slit: "You wanna know who can go one better than photons? Me, me, ME!!!" 

The Microscope:  "Think you can see stuff down those little tubes full of glass? Try Me, I can kick that ass 1,000 times!!"

The Television: "Wanna know how you can see cool stuff in your own living room? I gotta solution! Cathode rays!"

The Plasma Television:  "Still firing guns with cathode rays? Get with it, Go Plasmic! More of ME In There!"

Plasma: "now that's really cool. I mean, cool. Freezing me out of the water? No chance. Here's a cupla questions..."

Picture
So here's a proposition. You know all that Dark Matter and Energy that's supposed to be floating about making up (some huge) > % of the Universe? Well, what if it's just electrons? I mean, wouldn't be the first time something really arbitrary came out of the quantum soup, and as Steven Rolson says in his article under "Plasma" above, This work highlights the almost smooth transition between highly excited atoms sitting in a plasma and free electrons bound in a plasma. In fact, for typical parameters, the binding energy of an electron in an ultracold plasma is about the same as an n=80 Rydberg atom. As a result, identifying which is the plasma electron and which is an atomic electron can be challenging.

Which means, on the baseline, that one never knows what kind of electron one is looking at at any given moment, or its origin, or whether it's been replaced by another kind of electron since you last looked at it. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - ah yes, I almost forgot that one.... in most explanations of the Charlatan's Plaything, you'll find electrons.... 
here's The Guardian's take on it.
Picture
So, if electrons are Dark, which seems to make sense to me (especially since they rely on photons to move up and down the energy field), and Light is Light, which we already know quite a lot about, that just leaves a couple of carriers to satisfy SUSY (although even CERN admits in there that we've only got half the picture). There are even contenders for the supporting roles - the Positron to keep us, in kamikaze style, from a totally doom-encrusted negative Universe and that most mystical of spectra, the Ultraviolet. 
Lest we forget, Carbon atoms have 6 electrons, 6 protons, and 6 neutrons. That's 666, which could be rather important in the great scheme of human belief systems.

For a story and a couple of halves, there's more behind the picture....

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Kathy Ratcliffe has studied quantum mechanics since 1997, leads a life surrounded by birds and animals, and is a stalwart fan of Stargate SG1.

    Archives

    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    October 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    December 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.