American physicist John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008)
How many electrons are there in the Universe? A bold theory, advanced in 1940 by John Wheeler, suggests that there may only be one. But the bizarre theory has… some problems.
It is difficult to know for sure how many electrons there are in the Universe. In 1938, the British physicist Arthur Eddington proposed a number, which is now known as the ‘Eddington number‘.
Eddington’s calculation was actually for the number of protons in the Universe, but based on our knowledge of the physics of the early Universe, and the known properties of the electromagnetic force, we can assume that this it’s the same than the number of electrons.
Eddington’s number was 1,57 x 1079. Unfortunately, this estimate was based on a rather dubious physicsnote the . More modern estimates place this number slightly higher, at almost 1080 (i.e. 1 followed by 80 zeros).
However, according to the American theoretical physicist John Wheelerthere may be only one electron in the Universe. The story behind this idea was first reported by physicist Richard Feynmanduring the acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1965.
According to Feynman, Wheeler called him in the spring of 1940 and told him: “I know Why do all electrons have the same charge and the same mass?“. When Feynman asked him to elaborate on his claim, Wheeler said simply: “because They are all the same electron!”
Wheeler had realized that, mathematically speaking, electrons and their antiparticles, positrons, could be thought of as the same particlemass move in opposite directions through time: electrons are negatively charged and move forward through time, while positrons are positively charged and move backwards.
But, Wheeler thought, particles could move through ‘space-time’ of complex shapesso that a single particle could form a tight ‘knot’ of countless trajectories in space and time.
Thus, we could see this particle manifest in multiple locations simultaneously, giving the impression that they are different particlesWheeler suggests.
The electrons we see would correspond to trajectories moving forward through time, and positrons to backward-moving trajectories through time.
Wheelee’s idea, however, some problemsthe most important being the fact that there is in the Universe many more electrons than positronsjust as there is more matter than antimatter, while the single electron theory suggests that these should be equal.
Wheeler originally suggested, so unconvincingthat the missing positrons could be ‘hidden’ somewhereperhaps inside the protons.
Wheeler never followed up on this single-electron theory (and in fact, no one else did). It is now considered a interesting ‘thought experiment’but discarded; However, the idea of time inversion of electrons and positrons was later a major influence on some of Feynman’s work.
