Can 2 electrons ever touch?

Electrons repel each other right? But does it take relatively not a lot of force to get them to touch, and continue touching? Also I am wondering why if they can touch, why they cant coalesce into one another and create a larger electron like particle like tau or muon? If tau and muon are identical to electron but just greater mass, why dont two electrons attach and create a more massive electron, if prodded/compelled to do so?

reply to post by ImaFungi


Does anything ever really touch anything? When we place our hands on something its just a lot of forces that are repelling each other between the two surfaces.

reply to post by PhoenixOD



There's a good video about that here...




Lovely topic to discuss, thought provoking.

Yes you can get two electrons to touch each other. They do it all the time in particle accelerators.

reply to post by buster2010


But if they vaporize at the same time, does it still count as touching?

Normally the energy field is all that can touch. This surface tension energy field is all that touches. When we touch something, our cells do not touch the particles of an object, our energy field is what touches. This is how I understand it anyway, a catalyst can accomplish a bond though under the right conditions.

PhoenixOD
reply to post by ImaFungi

 

Does anything ever really touch anything? When we place our hands on something its just a lot of forces that are repelling each other between the two surfaces.

I personally don't think we ever really touch anything....

We could cut ourselves with the slightest touch of a scalpel or a razor blade. I don't believe in the 'we never touch' theory. We also feel the difference of textures etc.

Hellas
We could cut ourselves with the slightest touch of a scalpel or a razor blade. I don't believe in the 'we never touch' theory. We also feel the difference of textures etc.

Apparently we only feel the sensations of the electrons bouncing and moving about...what we perceive as touch is just our brain's way of telling us that we are interacting with a strong electromagnetic field. If you could zoom in to the atomic level of your fingertip and another object, you will see that they aren't touching at all.

reply to post by Agartha

Apparently we only feel the sensations of the electrons bouncing and moving about...what we perceive as touch is just our brain's way of telling us that we are interacting with a strong electromagnetic field. If you could zoom in to the atomic level of your fingertip and another object, you will see that they aren't touching at all. - See more at: www.abovetopsecret.com...

So you think that every object has different kinds of electrons which give us a different sensation than another object?

Hellas


So you think that every object has different kinds of electrons which give us a different sensation than another object?

Apparently we receive different data from different materials.....and the friction between surfaces is what can cut us, depending on the force of the friction and how the recipient surface deals with it.....a metal tile can deal with lots of friction but our skin can't.

But Hellas, this is basic physics I remember reading about but I am not a clever scientist......in fact, although I understand the concept, it's very difficult to picture it all in my head!

reply to post by Agartha


Yes that is primarily what I was thinking about, the 'hovering' thing, standing on the floor and how that 'makes sense'. So it has to do with mass and gravity I think and concentration of matter and density, like the idea that if it was fully compressed all the matter of your body could probably be compressed into the size of an area microscopic, or something... so its really these different sections of energy components and fields that group together in semi stable systems bottom up and top down. So if gravity was stronger we could maybe imagine 'the act of being harder to walk or feeling heavier' would really be more friction with the ground or or electrons closer or something? I have also always had a hard time understanding what 'fields' actually are and how they actually exist and this seems a very if not the most important aspect/theory as to how/why 'what my feet are at their most bottoms' are not truly touching or interacting with 'what the floor is at its most top'.

reply to post by ImaFungi


I guess more gravity would mean more friction, more difficult to 'hover'.......could we perhaps hurt ourselves more with stronger gravity???

I love Quantum physics.....it's mind blowing!!

Hellas
reply to post by Agartha

 

Apparently we only feel the sensations of the electrons bouncing and moving about...what we perceive as touch is just our brain's way of telling us that we are interacting with a strong electromagnetic field. If you could zoom in to the atomic level of your fingertip and another object, you will see that they aren't touching at all. - See more at: www.abovetopsecret.com...

So you think that every object has different kinds of electrons which give us a different sensation than another object?

Its the amount of electrons and the orbits that they occupy that make different types of matter. The way that the atoms are then chained together make different materials which behave in different ways which give different sensations that we perceive as touch feelings.

ImaFungi
Electrons repel each other right? But does it take relatively not a lot of force to get them to touch, and continue touching? Also I am wondering why if they can touch, why they cant coalesce into one another and create a larger electron like particle like tau or muon? If tau and muon are identical to electron but just greater mass, why dont two electrons attach and create a more massive electron, if prodded/compelled to do so?

Electrons can be represented with a wave function, and their fields can interact, but I would tend to think of this as a superposition/interaction of their wave functions and fields. The way you phrased the question about "touching" almost infers a particle model where the electrons would be seen perhaps as tiny marbles bumping into each other, but I'm not sure that is a valid way to look at electron electron collisions. For example the tiny marble model can't explain how the electron can pass through both slits of the double slit experiment:

Electron

The wave-like nature of the electron allows it to pass through two parallel slits simultaneously, rather than just one slit as would be the case for a classical particle. In quantum mechanics, the wave-like property of one particle can be described mathematically as a complex-valued function, the wave function, commonly denoted by the Greek letter psi (ψ)

Here is a paper which refers to electron-electron "collisions" which is an interaction, but I don't think "touching" is necessarily an accurate characterization of the interaction:

adsabs.harvard.edu...

Two-dimensional Fokker-Planck simulations have been conducted to investigate the inverse bremsstrahlung absorption and the evolution of the electron distribution function (EDF), where the electron-electron (e-e) collisions are taken into account, allowing for highly anisotropic electron distributions.

To understand better what happens in these interactions, you should study QED or Quantum Electrodynamics.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Thanks Arbitrageur, that is helpful information but at the same time I am thinking about the repercussions of this in the classical sense, like standing on the floor for instance, is this what the saying 'equal and opposite source' are getting at, that the electrons in the floor because of the stability of the material as a whole absorb your weight and send it back to you in a electromagnetically repulsive affect that allows you to stand on the floor, one, without chemically reacting with it, and without 'touching it' at all really, because of the 'field' that exists between the bottom of your foot and floor is not a field of 'attraction'? So EM field is kinda like air pockets that are so dense you can not pierce the area they take up but those air pockets are called field?

Arbitrageur

ImaFungi
Electrons repel each other right? But does it take relatively not a lot of force to get them to touch, and continue touching? Also I am wondering why if they can touch, why they cant coalesce into one another and create a larger electron like particle like tau or muon? If tau and muon are identical to electron but just greater mass, why dont two electrons attach and create a more massive electron, if prodded/compelled to do so?

Electrons can be represented with a wave function, and their fields can interact, but I would tend to think of this as a superposition/interaction of their wave functions and fields. The way you phrased the question about "touching" almost infers a particle model where the electrons would be seen perhaps as tiny marbles bumping into each other, but I'm not sure that is a valid way to look at electron electron collisions. For example the tiny marble model can't explain how the electron can pass through both slits of the double slit experiment:

Electron

The wave-like nature of the electron allows it to pass through two parallel slits simultaneously, rather than just one slit as would be the case for a classical particle. In quantum mechanics, the wave-like property of one particle can be described mathematically as a complex-valued function, the wave function, commonly denoted by the Greek letter psi (ψ)

Here is a paper which refers to electron-electron "collisions" which is an interaction, but I don't think "touching" is necessarily an accurate characterization of the interaction:

adsabs.harvard.edu...

Two-dimensional Fokker-Planck simulations have been conducted to investigate the inverse bremsstrahlung absorption and the evolution of the electron distribution function (EDF), where the electron-electron (e-e) collisions are taken into account, allowing for highly anisotropic electron distributions.

To understand better what happens in these interactions, you should study QED or Quantum Electrodynamics.

edit on 27-3-2014 by Arbitrageur because: clarification

Yes.

They don't actually "touch" in the particle accelerator either, but rather the bonds holding together all the little bits making up the electron are overpowered by the energy of the "collision."

The same goes for nuclear reactions where the strong force (holding like charged particles together at a very close range) is overpowered by the energy introduced from a collision.

Good question OP.

-FBB

ImaFungi
reply to post by Arbitrageur

 

Thanks Arbitrageur, that is helpful information but at the same time I am thinking about the repercussions of this in the classical sense, like standing on the floor for instance, is this what the saying 'equal and opposite source' are getting at, that the electrons in the floor because of the stability of the material as a whole absorb your weight and send it back to you in a electromagnetically repulsive affect that allows you to stand on the floor, one, without chemically reacting with it, and without 'touching it' at all really, because of the 'field' that exists between the bottom of your foot and floor is not a field of 'attraction'? So EM field is kinda like air pockets that are so dense you can not pierce the area they take up but those air pockets are called field?

Yes in a classical sense the force is called the normal force and friction is also a result of EM. The bonds between the particles is strong enough to support your weight (mass under gravity) and is classically defined by the school of physics known as statics. This includes things like tensile strength.

Yes there is no chemical reaction due to pressure because your weight is not enough to affect the EM bonds or those of the strong force.

-FBB

ImaFungi
So EM field is kinda like air pockets that are so dense you can not pierce the area they take up but those air pockets are called field?

It depends on the momentum/energy level of the electrons.The like charges cause them to repel each other, but if you give them enough energy, they can overcome the repulsion and "collide", so I wouldn't say the "air pockets" which we should call instead "space" can't be pierced. It can be pierced with enough energy, but normally lacking such high energy levels, they do maintain space between them.

By the way, this ultra-high energy level along with pressure is what facilitates nuclear fusion in a star, and it's also why scientists are skeptical about cold fusion where temperatures (aka energy levels) aren't high enough for the protons to overcome their repulsion to fuse heavier atoms.

FriedBabelBroccoli
They don't actually "touch" in the particle accelerator either, but rather the bonds holding together all the little bits making up the electron are overpowered by the energy of the "collision."

Are there little bits making up the electron? There may be, but I was under the impression that no evidence of such has been found yet.

Arbitrageur

FriedBabelBroccoli
They don't actually "touch" in the particle accelerator either, but rather the bonds holding together all the little bits making up the electron are overpowered by the energy of the "collision."

Are there little bits making up the electron? There may be, but I was under the impression that no evidence of such has been found yet.

Spinon, Orbiton, holons are what a solid electron can split into.
en.wikipedia.org...

Spinons are one of three quasiparticles, along with holons and orbitons, that electrons in solids are able to split into during the process of spin–charge separation, when extremely tightly confined at temperatures close to absolute zero.[1] The electron can always be theoretically considered as a bound state of the three, with the spinon carrying the spin of the electron, the orbiton carrying the orbital location and the holon carrying the charge, but in certain conditions they can become deconfined and behave as independent particles.

sciencepark.etacude.com...

Not-quite-so elementary, my dear electron

Fundamental particle ‘splits’ into quasiparticles, including the new ‘orbiton’.
www.nature.com...

Isolated electrons cannot be split into smaller components, earning them the designation of a fundamental particle. But in the 1980s, physicists predicted that electrons in a one-dimensional chain of atoms could be split into three quasiparticles: a ‘holon’ carrying the electron’s charge, a ‘spinon’ carrying its spin (an intrinsic quantum property related to magnetism) and an ‘orbiton’ carrying its orbital location1.

blah blah blah, I have NO IDEA how this really affects physics yet lol

-FBB