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This topic is offered for NewMars members who might wish to help to build up a collection of links, images and text about electrons.
The title can be changed as the topic evolves. What I'm hoping we can assemble is information a future resident of Mars might like to know.
There are a vast number of resources available in 2025.
I did not know this bit of history, and hope that someone else (reader or member) might find the details interesting.
The item was delivered by Quora. I don't know how I got on Quora's mailing list and I normally delete their offerings, but this one caught my eye.
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Alessandro13Mar 5, 2025
In 1883, Thomas Edison stumbled upon a strange clue: he noticed that a black dot would sometimes appear on the inside surface of one of the light bulbs he was examining, near the filament
This was strange, because the glass was always free of stains when it was sealed around the filament. The dot couldn’t have been a scratch (the filament never touched the glass), and it couldn’t have been soot or dust (there was almost no air in the bulb to carry the dust). The dot puzzled him, the problem intrigued him so much that it kept him awake at night. He wanted to investigate further, but his assistants were reluctant to do so. So, without outside help and with a taximeter that regulated his existence by leading him to solve more immediately billable problems, Edison eventually gave up. “I was working on so many things at that time,” he once said, many years later, “that I didn’t have time to do more.” It was the biggest mistake of his life.
Over the next ten years, a few other researchers began to take this and other phenomena into consideration. The most tenacious was a man a few years younger than Edison, Joseph John Thomson. He was the polar opposite, he had no practical sense, his hands could not tie a tie with dignity, he was not exactly what you would call a laboratory wizard, if even his friends - who called him J.J. - were embarrassed by his difficulty in building the experimental devices that he was able to easily design. But his capacity for abstraction soared higher than any researcher. He managed to build enlarged versions of Edison's light bulbs, and used magnets to act inside them and "pilot" whatever was emitted by the filaments. Then he weighed the particles in flight.
Thus, in 1897, he discovered the electron.
Atoms were not compact spheres; instead, pieces could be torn off, and the torn fragments could leap and slide forward, like balls, along any channel that opened before them. It was these fragments torn from atoms—electrons—that ran in a wire, generating an electric current. It was the collisions of these unruly bodies inside the filament of a light bulb that made the filament hot enough to emit light. And it was the impact of these unruly schoolchildren on the walls of the light bulb that left traces—that dark, unexpected dot that intrigued Edison and robbed him of sleep. Thomson won the Nobel. Edison became rich doing other things.
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Post #3: https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.ph … 59#p232159
Research on "g" factor (gyromagnetic) property
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The article at the link below reports on research about the electron:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolo … -expected/
The sense I get of the article is that the research team has been attempting to learn more about the electron, and that it has come up with theories that might be tested as electrons interact with magnetic fields.
It seems to me that trying to understand the electron (and other leptons) is a worthwhile undertaking.
Whether all the work reported leads to anything is not clear.
Understanding and refining the gyromagnetic factor, or “g factor,” is more than a theoretical pursuit-it directly impacts how we improve real-world tools like MRI machines, atomic clocks, and quantum sensors. These technologies depend on precisely measuring how tiny particles interact with magnetic fields, and even slight improvements in that understanding can lead to sharper images, more accurate timekeeping, and better sensors.
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The article at the link below is about investigation of behavior of electrons in various isotopes of Calcium. Very tiny differences were observed from theoretical predictions, so I'm guessing a lot more research lies in the future for physicists working in this part of physics. The hint is that there might a chance to refine the Standard Model of particle physics.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolo … ff60&ei=24
The transition of electrons in different calcium isotopes is hinting at something unexplained going on. - Image Credit: nobeastsofierce/Shutterstock.com
The transition of electrons in different calcium isotopes is hinting at something unexplained going on. - Image Credit: nobeastsofierce/Shutterstock.com
© IFL ScienceScientists have found an intriguing discrepancy in the way electrons behave in different calcium atoms. The difference between the observations and actual theoretical calculation is subtle; however, the team believes the peculiar effect comes down to a single factor. Whether this factor is something known and missed, or something new, is yet to be determined, but researchers suggest it as tentative evidence for a fifth force of nature.
There are four known canonical forces in the universe: gravity, electromagnetism, strong, and weak nuclear forces. The Standard Model of particle physics doesn’t include gravity (it is much weaker than the other three at a particle level), and it also doesn’t include dark matter and dark energy, which are hypothetical but strongly believed to exist thanks to extensive evidence. It has its limits, so people look for where those limits might break to reveal new physics.
Ideas related to a fifth force have been around for a long time in different aspects of physics and solving different problems. In this case, the force might be hiding right at the center of atoms… which was, for a while, the hiding place of the two nuclear forces.
The team looked at calcium isotopes. These are calcium atoms, so they have the same number of protons in the nucleus and electrons swarming around, but they might have a different number of neutrons. The most common calcium is Calcium-40, made of 20 protons and 20 neutrons, but there are stable versions. Calcium-42 with 22 neutrons, Calcium-44 with 24, and Calcium-46 with 26. You get the picture.
Related video: The Four Fundamental Forces That Shape Our Universe (Aperture)
Electrons are organized in orbitals around the core. These are not linear orbits like a planet around a star, but regions where the electron is likely to be. By providing a bit of energy, the electron can be kicked onto a higher orbital, though it will emit that energy after a while and go back to its original state.
This process, known as transition, depends on the properties of the nucleus, and it is different for these different isotopes because the presence of extra neutrons shifts the charge distribution in the nucleus. The team plotted the transition shift between the Ca, Ca, Ca, and Ca and the standard calcium-40. If everything were taken into account, the shift would follow a linear relation. But there is a small discrepancy.
The origin of the discrepancy is unknown. It is possible that there are some Standard Model effects and that the calculations have not included them. A similar challenge to the Standard Model was solved just like that after years of data collection. Or it might be the first hint of a fifth force.
If it is a fifth force, it is very weak. It is also mediated by a boson particle that could be lighter than a neutrino or much heavier than a top quark. While that range is huge for a particle, it is the most stringent limit yet for such a hypothetical interaction.
A paper describing the measurements is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
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