[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The electron is a theory we use. It is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real.
Rick Rosner: Is that Feynman again?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: So, that’s his pragmatism again. As a kid, he would fix people’s early radios. So he’s a kid I think in the 20s and everybody had these crystal radio sets which were pretty primitive but probably actually improving in quality year by year as radio became super important in people’s lives but his reputation was the boy who fixes radios by thinking. He loved that, that he’d look at a radio and instead of immediately tinkering with it he’d turn it on, listens to it, look at it, and then think and then until he’d figured out what must be the deal and then he’d immediately fix it. Feynman also had a standing bet where at Los Alamos you could come up to him and present him with a problem; a word problem, a math problem, his claim was that he could get within 10% of the answer within 60 Seconds. It could be anything; how many trees are there in America and he’d be able to think up the answer. I think it was that kind of challenge or it could be anything.
The electron has some characteristics but it’s known or should be known as much for its lack of characteristics as its characteristics. Protons are complicated; they have quarks, they get a lot of shit going on, they have a substructure. Electrons exist as point particles. Now you can’t localize the point but they are a point and they have charge and they have spin and not a lot else to the point where they are pretty mathematically pure and to where they’re just kind of generic, maybe it was Feynman but somebody came up with a theory that there’s only one electron in the whole universe and it’s just we see it as all the electrons in the universe because it goes forward and backward in time. Two electrons interact with each other and most of the time or a lot of the time you can’t even tell which electron is which. If you can’t tell which is which, then they’re mathematically indistinguishable. You can’t say which electron is which after they interact. In some way they’re placeholders.
I think of them as in my primitive way is as twists in space that are adjuncts to protons that a proton is not in space and maybe time but at least space, a knot in causality. It’s a knot of some sort and in tying the knot you’ve imparted a twist to space and or space and time. And the only way to relieve that twist that you’ve put on things is to have a reverse twist in the form of an electron. So I believe that the number of protons and electrons in a system that works the way our universe does is always identical. Basically, an electron somewhere is part of the particle that’s a proton. You bring a proton into existence and that necessitates as part of its existence an electron even if the electron is way the fuck someplace else.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 