Altered Matter

Trying to understand the nature of the atom is a noble enterprise ...

But what happens when you go beyond what makes sense? When you try to outsmart the smartest? Remember: It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!

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The colloquium had been an outstanding success. Physicists from across the continent had gathered at Stanford to hear Angelo Zifferelli, visiting professor from the University of Turin, discuss the results of a series of unique experiments allowing him to alter the electrical charge of an electron.

Fourteen years after the electron had been discovered by J. J. Thompson in 1897, Ernest Rutherford determined this minute part of an atom carried a negative electrical charge. In time, scientists learned for every negatively charged electron, there was a corresponding positively charged proton which, along with electrically neutral neutrons, formed the core or nucleus of the atom.

They also learned matter on the atomic level did not behave like matter observed by scientists like Isaac Newton. When Newton measured natural forces, he was certain the outcome applied to any situation of which he could conceive. When physicists in the 1920s measured atomic forces, they were never certain.

Professor Zifferelli had used dice as his example of the probability problem of subatomic physics − perhaps because of Einstein’s oft-quoted “God does not play dice with the universe.” He explained when a gambler throws dice, he had none of the details of the throw, of the dice themselves, nor of the table upon which the dice were thrown. The ignorance of these details precluded predicting an exact outcome of the throw. Oh, you could calculate the probability of snake-eyes, but that was a simple mathematical probability; nothing like predicting the behavior of electrons, protons, and neutrons. In the world of quantum mechanics, the physics developed to explain the nature of atoms — natural laws governing the decay of a neutron, for example — were inherently probabilistic. Scientists did not lack the details of what happened; they were not ignorant of the process. There was simply no way to say when the neutron would decay into an electron and proton. All they could say was it was probable the neutron would decay within, say, in the next instant or in the next twenty-five thousands years or so.

The same probability, Zifferelli continued, applies to the sun. “Our average-size star has a probable lifetime of ten billion years. It has already burned for half that time. So you would think it would burn for another five billion years, but you’d be wrong. Because of its atomic nature, the sun’s lifetime is only a probability. It could continue its thermonuclear reactions for five billion years, or it could already have begun expanding to its red giant phase, the first phase of its death. If that were the case, we’d know the answer in about eight minutes, the time it takes for light from the sun to reach earth.”

But Professor Zifferelli had not come to Stanford to talk about the sun or improbable activities within an atom. He had come to talk about something much smaller. The electron.

“With so much uncertainty in the behavior of atoms, we wonder why there are particular measurements we make that are constant,” he said, noting the speed of light and the force of gravity as examples.

“The electron’s charge and its mass − along with the mass of the proton − are also constants,” Zifferelli said. “If you were to measure these dimensions of any atom anywhere in the physical universe they would be identical, within of course the accuracy of the instrument used to measure them.

“Why,” he continued, “these particular phenomena are constant, we do not know. Why the electron has a negative charge of one point six, oh, two, one, seven, seven, seven, three, three times ten to the minus nineteen coulomb, we do not know.” 

For those who don’t understand scientific notation, 1.60277733 X 10-19 coulomb can be written thus: take 160277733 coulomb − the measure of electric charge − and put a decimal point and eighteen zeros in front of it … like this …0.000000000000000000160277733. It’s an incredibly small number, but it doesn’t change no matter which electron you measure, and there are billions and billions and billions of electrons in the universe.