Weird electron behavior

The "no rest mass" description is an exageration. The electrons move at 1/300th the speed of light, while zero-rest-mass particles would move AT the speed of light.

Mark

You tell'em, Bill! We can't allow no electron disrespect around here, no siree!

John

Last year some physicists managed to split sheets of graphite off by themselves, making a sheet of carbon atoms only one carbon atom thick. And they were stable when created.

Now physicists are finding that electrons move through them like they had no mass, or 1000 times faster than in normal metals.

Robert

No, it implies that they have no fashion sense at all. Tachyons need a

John

Let me preface my answer by saying that I don't take discussion of tachyons seriously. They have never been experimentally detected, nor has anbody ever proposed a way in which they might be detectable (to my knowledge).

The answer to your question is no. A negative (rest) mass would imply that a particle accelerates in the opposite direction to an applied force. (F=ma is still valid. Or, more correctly, F = dp/dt ). It's speed would still be below c.

I'm not sure what faster-than-light speeds would require. Mathematically, it might require that the mass is an imaginary number. All the more reason why I don't take the whole concept seriously.

Regards,

Mark

Yeah, those electrons are certainly weird. But what are you gonna do?

In article , wrote: [...]

No, all electrons are weird.

So does that imply that tachyons have < zero mass?

No the latest studies show that they are just gluons that are not completely dry.

"Nothing is real" ....John Lennon

martin

The fact that tachyons are represented by *complex* numbers has zero releveance to wheather they are a viable (existance) concept or not.

This "imaginary" number bit has an amazing amount of bad press. The name should never have been used in the first place in mathematics. Its why I never use the term. I use the term "complex". *All* numbers are imaginary. We represent *all* physical entities with numbers. The fact that this representation may be with ordered pairs, triplets, 2nd order tensors, twisters etc, has no baring on the reality of a physical object. The numbers are just a way of describing the object, they are not the object itself.

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

Tachyons have complex mass, i.e. of the form, jm or im, depending on whether you are a an engineer or a mathematician.

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

Ahmm...You give me far to much credit on physics!

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

Okay, all electrons are identically weird. This doesn't help you when you want to explain why they are behaving oddly in a particular situation.

------------ Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Intellectually speaking, yes.His opinions outside of engineering do seem to be at ninety degrees to the real axis.

His physical mass does seem to be depressingly real, finite and positive.

-------------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

May I infer from that that jim is a mathematician-engineer hybrid and has a negative mass? :-)

Nice ones. Truly excellent wit.

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

Well, ya big silly! They're confusing relativistic electrons with massless Dirac fermions.

Any schoolchild should be able to grok the difference.

Good Luck! Rich

Yeah, I thought that had been well-known since they were discovered. How else could they move backwards in time, unless they had negative mass?

Thanks, Rich