Electricity, not Electrons

The Shocking Revelation of Non-Materiality

Hello Friends,

I’m teaching science at the middle school level again for a couple weeks, currently immersed in lots of studies of electricity and magnetism. I like teaching this subject very much (is there a subject in science I don’t like teaching? Ummm… nope!), and I’m being reminded right now of persistent “growing edge” questions that, while I don’t bring them up in class (it would complicate the picture too much for these budding scientific investigators), I am often dwelling on them “in the background.”

Right now, one of the things I’m thinking about is electrons. When you are teaching about electricity, how and when should you bring up electrons? How should we think about electrons? What is an electron, really?

This is definitely a science-y post, to an extent. But what I want to do is try to only glance at the science along the way of asking what to me are higher level questions, questions that arise while witnessing the narrative bias we have in thinking about and teaching things like electricity.

The electron is something that most adults have some awareness of, of course, through their schooling or popular science. I bet many of us had to learn the Bohr model of the atom, in which we imagine electrons, like moons, whiz around the central protons and neutrons. If you took chemistry, too, you might have calculated the orbital position of valence electrons in certain elements, or balancing chemical equations by counting electrons. This way of thinking leads to the theory behind the arrangement of elements in the periodic table, which I bet most of us have been exposed to. Good and well enough, but again, what is an electron, anyway?

If you have even more scientific familiarity, you may know something about J.J. Thompson’s cathode ray tube experiments in which he, for the first time, established a charge-to-mass ratio for the electron (Thompson called it “radiant matter”). Or you may have heard about Millikan’s experiments with very fine mists of oil droplets in a vacuum chamber suspended between charged plates, in which the first estimates of the electron’s mass were made. Finally, perhaps you’ve heard that Albert Einstein did not win the Nobel prize for his famous theory of relativity, but for his much less-well-known theoretical prediction of the photoelectric effect, in which red light that shines at an electrically charged plate causes it to lose charge. The explanation of this experiment often involves imagining light as particles (photons) colliding with the electrons (also imagined as particles) and “freeing them” from the charged plate. In the popular understanding of this experiment, both light and electricity are imagined as billiard balls pinging each other. Or, they are imagined as “quanta” (little packages) of energy exchange or delivery that can affect each other (don’t get me started on what energy is!)

It doesn’t really matter how much of this you’ve heard of. But, you’ve probably heard of some of it. And it leads to the interesting (to me) question: do all of these experiments and measurements amount to the conclusion that the electron is “real”? And, stepping back one more level, we can ask: “How do we figure out what’s real, anyway?”

Questions like these fascinate me, and I know that they don’t interest everyone the same amount. Yet, I believe they are crucially important, because if it is naively taken for granted that electrons are really real, independent of our experiments, notions and thoughts about them, then we risk becoming fundamentalist in our thinking. We risk digging ever deeper into electron-worship and therefore cutting ourselves off from the full phenomena of electricity.

According to the theory, electrons have a “resting mass” of 9.109 X 10^-31 kilograms. So, take a kilogram, and divide it by ten 31 times in a row. This is an impossibly small number, never measurable by any physical means. And this is by design, since the electron itself is supposed to be a “building block” of matter, so what physical scale could measure this value? This value is an “ideal” value based on experiments, theory, and to make the equations work that predict the behavior of materials in experimental conditions. Oh, yes, and also, according to the theory, electrons never rest, so it is doubly an ideal number.

In fact, electrons are understood to be constantly in motion, and due to their impossible small size and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, by definition one can never know the exact position of an electron, ever. So, go back to that Bohr model of the atom and the electrons like little moons and please admit to yourself that this is a terribly, ridiculously flawed model. There are no moons, they are not orbiting, and even if they were, we can’t ever witness or locate a single one. More nuanced understandings of electrons imagine them as “probability distributions” of their most likely locations. These are often referred to as electron “clouds”. So, no more moons, but clouds. Things are getting much fuzzier, right? OK, but the cloud is really a real thing, isn’t it? There is something there, an imaginary particle that carries a miniscule bit of mass and charge… isn’t there? Or, are we going to be forced to admit that quantities like mass and charge, while measurable, do not entirely explain the mystery of electricity, and never will?

Moons, clouds, billiard balls, building blocks, packets of delivered energy . . .obviously these are analogies to things we experience in the physical, sense world. Is it really our goal to transfer these experiences naively to the always mysterious world of the unseeable, so that we can thereby demystify it, and pretend it’s just like our familiar world? Why are we so motivated to to do this, anyway? It certainly has to do with the desire to control. If we can make a model, no matter how obviously oversimplified, then perform experiments that demonstrate predictable results (a measure of control), then we say, we have “understood it.” But this notion of understanding is so impoverished from more time-tested notions of understanding, one has to ask, what are we gaining by pretending that electrons are like moons, balls, or clouds? And, what are we losing?

Here is one thing we are losing. So many of us are so far down the rabbit hole of electron worship, that it’s commonplace for people “who know something about science” to say that when you touch something, like a table, with your hand, it is really only the electrons in your hand repelling the electrons in the table. This is so ridiculous, to have inserted the abstraction of electrons between my own obvious sense of touch, I often wonder why we teach such gobbledygook. We are literally being asked to trust and believe in an imaginary particle over what we can really touch. No wonder so many people give up on science at a young age . . .

So, if we want to think of the electron as a “real thing,” we are really stretching our notions of what a “thing” is in the first place. And here we get to very basic notions of what’s really real. Even still today, to most people, what’s really real is what we can touch, what has heft, what you can press up against, what you can physically manipulate (this notion is falling apart for many people as we lose confidence in science and popular media, and has led many people to say just the opposite: that only the entirely spiritual is really real, via religious belief. But this is just the other side of the same coin, and most people that I experience imagining the spiritual world in this way are just imagining a more ‘heavenly version” of the regular physical world, maybe without all the warts and the “bad people”). From this basic intuition that what we can touch and lift is real, we derive the abstract scientific concept of mass: something with mass, we say, is a real thing. Electrons have mass. Ergo, electrons are real things.

But that mass is entirely theoretical and relativistic, so where did our intuition go, now? We must choose, either to accept an abstracted notion of mass (weight or heft), position (measured distance) and then apply it to the electron… or we admit that the electron is only an idea. And since it’s an idea, we, the ones that made up the idea, are always involved in its “realness.”

In certain limited conditions, the idea of the electron is a very serviceable idea, to be sure. We can build scanning tunneling electron microscopes, which can image the electrical topography of very small surfaces. Some have even claimed that these microscopes are allowing us to “see atoms.” But this stretches the intuitional notions of what it means to see. . .do you see??

I hope it doesn't feel like I’m splitting philosophical hairs (“splitting atoms”?). Where the rubber meets the road is if we teach each other and talk to each other as if electrons naively “exist”, independent of our thoughts, restrictions, equations, calculations and notions of them, then we have “thing-ified” the invisible world. In essence, we have made new gods (or demi-gods), and infused them with mythology. (And it’s not even a very compelling mythology.)

So, when I teach about electricity and magnetism, I spend all my time trying to show students what the conditions are that lead to the creation of a static electric charge, and what conditions can produce an electric current, and what the qualities of insulators and conductors are. I don’t talk about electrons moving through wires (they don’t. Really, they don’t. Watch this video if you have any doubts here). What I talk about is buildups of electric charge, and discharge. We can experience and feel when something is charged. It feels “fuzzy,” “tingly”, and may create an ozone smell. And when there’s a discharge, we may see hair that was standing up straight suddenly drop, or hear a snap or pop, or even see white or blue sparks. None of this requires the imaginary theoretical idea of electrons to explain.

When Ben Franklin first proposed that all the observed electrical effects of his time could be explained with just two kinds of charge, he was trying to simplify things. Many others had proposed that there were three, four, or more distinct types of charge. But Ben said only two could account for every observable electrical phenomenon, applying that famous logical tool Ockhams’ Razor, that the simplest explanation that accounts for the facts should be the one preferred. Now, as we have built up the Shrine to the Electron, ironically and unfortunately we have introduced a new kind of nearly impenetrable unnecessary complexity! It is a model that is just not needed for most applications, nor for a really good understanding of electricity, so why do we insist on it? (An electrician, for example, needs to understand exactly zero about electrons to do her job) The only good reason I can think of for this weirdness is: electrons are one among our modern panoply of demi-gods. And people get touchy if you mess with their gods.

As always, I welcome your responses, thoughts, challenges. Thank you!

Photo by Felix Mittermeier on Unsplash