Dr Quantum / Bust a few brain cells.

[Isle Of Bute Saint]

3 hours ago, oaksoft said:

If you hadn't been such a dick, you could have led with that and I would have answered you on the first page.

Right. Strap yourself in. It isn't easy to explain something which is purely mathematical using analogies and pictures to anyone who lacks the many many years of education in the subject but I'll have a go.

Electrons are tiny and weigh almost nothing.

In order to see anything you need to see how it interacts with electromagnetic waves.

For example, visible light is an electromagnetic wave. You shine that light on something and you see what it reflects and absorbs. That is how you see things. Now think about where that light comes from. The sun. It comes in as packets of photons. These photons have momentum and you feel that as warmth on your skin.

If photons hit an electron, it has the effect of a swinging mallet on a snooker ball. The ball moves quite a considerable distance away from where it originally was and it changes its behaviour. So, whoever or whatever made the world we live in, they teased us by ensuring that you can never actually see the smallest pieces which make it up. Nobody has ever seen an electron and nobody ever will.

We use a mathematical object called a wavefunction to describe electrons. It contains everything that is possible to know about the electron including everywhere the electron can possibly be. The ACTUAL electron can only be in one place but the MATHS must cover all bases. When you make an observation of a property of the electron, you get to see which of these mathematically possibilities actually exist in reality. The other possibilities describbed by the wavefunction by definition can't be true and the purely mathematical wavefunction "collapses" and you are left with the single property value.

If you want more info than that you need to be looking at Quantum Electrodynamics. Strangely enough, someone posted a video by the discoverer of that Physics in a post above. In addition to 4 years of maths and physics at school, you are looking at a minimum of 5 years of maths and physics at university plus a PhD as well (which is 3 to 5 years in the UK). So that's a total of about 12 to 14 years of education I am trying to save you here.  Makes tou wonder why we put photographs of schoolkids in the papers when they get their Standar Grades results because they have barely started the journey to anything meaningful. The kicker is that even after all of that, most people still don't really know for certain what happens at the scale of an electron. 

With a requirement of at least 12 to 14 years of training, maybe now you can appreciate a little more why I am so harsh with the sort of pseudoscience bollox you and snake keep posting here?

Thank you Mr Oaksoft it's all fascinating stuff.