How do electrons work?

Have you ever wondered about those pesky little electrons that dance upon static charges and sting you like crazed insects? Well, let me tell you that they are even crazier than you could imagine.

The lowly electron is considered a sub-atomic particle of the lepton family. It has a negative charge and is unimaginably tiny with a ridiculously small mass--9.109 X 10 to -31 power kg. The really weird property of the electron is that it can act as a particle or a wave. This duality is what nearly drove Einstein crazy. It’s a quantum physics reality that all physicists accept, and it’s what makes modern science possible. Einstein’s theory of relativity proposed that electrons could travel at the speed of light. That’s why electricity is so useful. It’s always on instant demand. But, how does the electron work in atoms?

First of all, Coulomb attractive force binds electrons to the nuclei of atoms. If the number of electrons is the same as the number of protons in the nucleus than the resulting structure is an atom. If the number of electrons doesn’t match with the protons, it’s called an ion. The crazy thing about the electrons that obit atomic nuclei is that their energy and velocity can not be determined at the same time, which means that they’re enigmatic little devils. However, the electron shells around atoms are what we see if we use powerful electron microscopes to see atoms. The nuclei of atoms are tiny compared to the overall size of the atom, which means that we are made of mostly space. We just look solid, but this is an illusion.

Electrons have many uses in technology. They power our homes, providing us with light, heat, and appliance power, and provide us with ‘The View’ TV show. They also power our phones, our MP3 players, our digital watches and most of the electronic gadgets we’ve grown to love. They also allow scientists to observe extremely tiny things by directing a focused beam of electrons onto a target that’s in a vacuum and then record the changes to the electrons to form an image. They’ve used even more electron tricks to see things down to less than 0.05 nanometers, tiny enough to see atoms.

The study of electricity--the flow of electrons--was conducted long before anyone knew what electrons really were. Even Benjamin Franklin studied electricity and he proved that a lightening bolt consisted of an enormous and powerful flow of electricity, and this helped him invent the lightening rod. Clues to the identity of these tiny particles were amassed during the latter part of the nineteenth century by some well know physicist such as the British John S. Townsend, H. A. Wilson, and Arthur Shuster, and Americans Robert Millikan, and Harvey Fletcher.

It was Earnest Rutherford that helped establish the structure of the atom with electrons in 1914. All of his work and the work of many others helped in our understanding of this difficult to study particle.

To give you an idea of how crazy these tiny electrons are, one only has to study the double slit experiment that established Quantum physics as a legitimate science. If one shoots an electron beam at a double slit target, one sees that the electrons pass through both slits at the same time, something no one in their right mind would predict. This crazy action is because quantum particles like the electron, can act as both particles and waves.

Physicists believe that electrons were made in the Big Bang when only a millisecond after it happened and the temperature was over ten billion Kelvin, photons were able to react together to form electrons and positrons (the evil antithesis of the electron) and after a few seconds the electrons prevailed in the annihilation battle between the two forms.

In any event, electrons are extremely important to us humans and we should respect them because they can kill us.

Thanks for reading.