QUESTION #114

Is it possible to find the radius of an electron?

Asked by: Bindu

Answer

The honest answer would be, nobody knows yet. The current knowledge is that the electron seems to be a 'point particle' and has refused to show any signs of internal structure in all measurements. We have an upper limit on the radius of the electron, set by experiment, but that's about it. By our current knowledge, it is an elementary particle with no internal structure, and thus no 'size'.
Answered by: Yasar Safkan, Ph.D. M.I.T., Software Engineer, Istanbul, Turkey

'The strength and weakness of physicists is that we believe in what we can measure. And if we can't measure it, then we say it probably doesn't exist. And that closes us off to an enormous amount of phenomena that we may not be able to measure because they only happened once. For example, the Big Bang. ... That's one reason why they scoffed at higher dimensions for so many years. Now we realize that there's no alternative... '

Michio Kaku
(1947-)