The one-electron universe postulate, proposed by theoretical physicist John Wheeler in a telephone call to

Richard Feynman Richard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfl ...

in the spring of 1940, is the hypothesis that all

electron The electron ( or ) is a subatomic particle with a negative one elementary electric charge. Electrons belong to the first generation of the lepton particle family, and are generally thought to be elementary particles because they have no ...

s and positrons are actually manifestations of a single entity moving backwards and forwards in time. According to Feynman: A similar "zigzag world line description of pair annihilation" has been independently devised by E. C. G. Stueckelberg at the same time.

Overview

The idea is based on the

world line The world line (or worldline) of an object is the path that an object traces in 4-dimensional spacetime. It is an important concept in modern physics, and particularly theoretical physics. The concept of a "world line" is distinguished from c ...

s traced out across

spacetime In physics, spacetime is a mathematical model that combines the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional manifold. Spacetime diagrams can be used to visualize relativistic effects, such as why differ ...

by every electron. Rather than have myriad such lines, Wheeler suggested that they could all be parts of one single line like a huge tangled knot, traced out by the one electron. Any given moment in time is represented by a slice across spacetime, and would meet the knotted line a great many times. Each such meeting point represents a real electron at that moment. At those points, half the lines will be directed forward in time and half will have looped round and be directed backwards. Wheeler suggested that these backwards sections appeared as the

antiparticle In particle physics, every type of particle is associated with an antiparticle with the same mass but with opposite physical charges (such as electric charge). For example, the antiparticle of the electron is the positron (also known as an antie ...

to the electron, the positron. Many more electrons have been observed than positrons, and electrons are thought to comfortably outnumber them. According to Feynman he raised this issue with Wheeler, who speculated that the missing positrons might be hidden within protons. Feynman was struck by Wheeler's insight that antiparticles could be represented by reversed world lines, and credits this to Wheeler, saying in his Nobel speech: Feynman later proposed this interpretation of the positron as an electron moving backward in time in his 1949 paper "The Theory of Positrons".

Yoichiro Nambu was a Japanese-American physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. Known for his contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008 for the discovery in 1960 of the mechanism ...

later applied it to all production and

annihilation In particle physics, annihilation is the process that occurs when a subatomic particle collides with its respective antiparticle to produce other particles, such as an electron colliding with a positron to produce two photons. The total energy ...

of particle-antiparticle pairs, stating that "the eventual creation and annihilation of pairs that may occur now and then, is no creation nor annihilation, but only a change of directions of moving particles, from past to future, or from future to past."

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:One-Electron Universe Thought experiments in quantum mechanics Quantum electrodynamics 1940 in science Physical cosmology Conceptual models Richard Feynman Electron

Overview

See also

References

External links