Get the latest tech news
The Theory That There Is Only One Electron in the Universe
Electrons are everywhere. But what if it's the same one?
"I received a telephone call one day at the graduate college at Princeton from Professor Wheeler, in which he said, 'Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass'," Feynman said in his 1965 Nobel Lecture. If in one section this is an ordinary electron world line, in the section in which it reversed itself and is coming back from the future we have the wrong sign to the proper time – to the proper four velocities – and that’s equivalent to changing the sign of the charge, and, therefore, that part of a path would act like a positron'.” Though a thought experiment, and likely not supposed to be taken seriously, the phone call had a lasting impact on Feynman, writing a paper on how positrons can be described as if they are electrons moving backward in time.
Or read this on Hacker News
