• Question: What does an electron look like?

    Asked by fishbulb25 to Adam, Geoff, Rob, Sheila, Suzie on 15 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Suzie Sheehy

      Suzie Sheehy answered on 11 Mar 2011:

      Great question – thanks!

      I have to be honest with you, your question made me stop and think for a minute!

      When we “look” at things normally, what we’re seeing is the light that bounces off an object and back to our eyes, so we’re seeing how light interacts with an object. But when you get down to this level, the interactions are a bit different – the energy of the light can be absorbed by the electron… that changes things a bit!

      The truth is, we don’t really know what an electron looks like. Electrons are what we call ‘point’ particles, which means they don’t have a size. But we can observe them because they interact with other things.

      The other weird thing is that because of quantum mechanics, an electron sometimes acts more like a wave than a particle. If you could see them whizzing around the atom they would look like a wavy ethereal mush of electron-ness, rather than a dot on an orbit. At least, that’s the picture I have in my head!

      Somehow, though, there is this other stubborn idea in my head that an electron looks like a black dot on the page of my high school physics book – but unfortunately it’s not really true! Also, I recently came across these: http://www.particlezoo.net/individual_pages/shop_electron.html – If only particles were really so cute!

      (Interestingly I have friends who say the electron ‘dots’ in their books were blue, green or white – we all have these crazy images of particles from when we first learned about them!

    • Photo: Adam Tuff

      Adam Tuff answered on 12 Mar 2011:

      An excellent question! Because they are so small, you can’t see them with your eye, and even with sophisticated microscopes it’s hard to see them! Electrons are also a bit weird in that it is very hard to tell where one is. They orbit the nucleus of an atom, but unlike a planet orbiting a star, you could not draw (if you could draw in space!) a circle showing their orbit. Instead they exist in a weird “probability cloud”. This isn’t like the clouds you see in the sky, but is a good way of showing where an electron is likely to be – in some orbits you might have a high chance of seeing the electron there, and in some you probably won’t see the electron.

    • Photo: Geoff McBride

      Geoff McBride answered on 12 Mar 2011:

      You can’t see electrons they are too small. We can only try and predict roughly where they are.

    • Photo: Sheila Kanani

      Sheila Kanani answered on 12 Mar 2011:

      In my head I imagine it looking like a small blue marble orbiting a larger cluster of red and white marbles (the nucleus!).

    • Photo: Robert Simpson

      Robert Simpson answered on 15 Mar 2011:

      Electrons are amazing – you can pin them down with an electron microscope but at the same time, you never really know where they are. An electron is the smallest particle of electric charge that exists – it has a little bit of mass as well. It is a fundamental unit of the Universe.

      In the realm of quantum mechanics, it is impossible to know exactly where an electron is without losing other information about it. Because of this, scientists talk about the ‘probability’ that an electron exists in s specific location. Although we can measure the effect of an electron, we can never see one. they are too small and too improbable for us to understand them as objects – which I think is really cool!

      All of this is why we ‘model’ an electron as a little ball in classes – its simple and it works for a lot of the simple ways that we talk about these fundamental particles – but I think that the rather awesome answer to your question is that an electron doesn’t ‘look’ like anything because it cannot be seen – only inferred.

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