io9 
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San Francisco, 7:30 PM
Sat Dec 5
11 posts in the last 24 hours
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07/31/09
I kid of course, but sometimes I found the science curriculum at my school tended to oversimplify. Then the next year would begin with, "Remember what you learned last year? Yeah, that's not how it works...." I recognize that some simplification is necessary, especially when one's younger and new to science, but Bill Nye seemed to get it right....
07/31/09
Fuck you. I'm not even trying to understand it, now.
07/31/09
Best comment I have ever seen on this site.
Don't give up on particle physics, particle physics isn't giving up on you!!
07/31/09
07/31/09
08/02/09
07/31/09
07/31/09
The science textbooks aren't wrong. Electrons are indivisible.
The problem is the use of "particle" - we're here not talking about actual particles but rather quasiparticles, theoretical descriptions of excitations in the collective behaviour of electrons. An example of a such particle is a phonon - it's not a real particle, but rather describes how a vibration can move through matter (imagine doing The Wave at a sports game, you're a real particle, while the wave is a quasiparticle going round the stadium - it's the same with atoms/electrons and phonons)
What the article is talking about is an effect observed when you have plenty of electrons packed in a small thin space. The collective behaviour is similar to that of a fluid consisting of two types of particles, one carrying only charge, and another that carries the spin.
It's still electrons doing the jiggling, spinning and all - it's just that the WAY they behave is better described by this spin-charge separation instead of more classical descriptions which misses some subtle effects which has now been observed in this experiment.
07/31/09
07/31/09
I like to think I'm good at plain language, but this is much much better than I could have done. Besides, high energy physics was my specialty anyway.
07/31/09
07/31/09
07/31/09
07/31/09
The cops came and I got banned for life from the entire chain, so I need to find another place. Please help.
07/31/09
08/01/09
what you are saying is that they are just giving different names to the same electron depending on what state it is in?
Not quite. What it is is this: electrons have (among others) two properties: charge and spin. When you have a bunch of electrons together in the situation at hand, the combined charge behaves in a way that makes it easier to explain things if you thing of that accumulated charge as acting independently of the combined spin, as if you had two separate particles.
Now, though I'm a physicist, my specialty is not condensed matter (I'm a particle physicist), so I may not be accurate in what I said above. Just sayin'...
I actually thought electrons might be made up of smaller particles.
There are theories proposing that but none of them have much experimental support on their behalf.
Does this go for Protons as well?
Protons are not elementary. They are made up of 3 quarks: 2 "up" quarks and 1 "down" quark.
What about the anti-electron - the positron?
Same as the electron. The major difference between the two is their charge (and a few other less significant properties): the electron has a negative charge, the positron has a positive one (with the same magnitude).
07/31/09
07/31/09
07/31/09
I'ts turtles all the way down.
07/31/09
06/30/09