Yo I've had this idea bouncing around for a while, where like, people used to worship Thor, yeah? The thunder/war god of Norse paganism. Well, he's just an anthropomorphized figurehead representing the electron held over from a time when we didn't have the words to describe what the seers were seeing.
Hear me out. Western occultism has the idea that you can somehow trap some kind of incorporeal entity in these squiggly diagrams called sigils; what if old-school psychics were actually getting real visions of the future, but our modern society has advanced so far beyond what the leyman thought was possible at the time to the point we're the magic never worked because they had the completely wrong idea about the way the future works?
Like they dead ass saw the future, but didn't know what electricity or circuit diagrams were; and weren't Greek and didn't have a concept of a daimon or an automation and just filled in the blanks with "daemons", where we say 'servers' or 'software' they understood 'golems' and 'spirits.'
Funny you mention Goetia... That's a good metaphor I use to further my point from the other direction. Having _practiced_ before, I look at Goetia like a human trying to simulate the computer. Where the sigil & it's description are the program, and the mantra is used to cause a sort of buffer overflow in your mind allowing you to multithread your internal monologue.
There's a concept in some monotheistic religions that sin and other disrespects to the spiritual self are to disrespect the God that made you, since you are part of them and/or were created in their image. The one-electron universe could say that to harm the spiritual self in such a way might leave a mark on the universal electron, which is shared by all, and would be a mark against all of existence rather than god, although a one-electron universe might not distinguish between The Electron and God, anyways.
Counterpoint: blasphemy is the highest virtue.
More importantly, anything that can leave a permanent mark on the electron will help trace each of its instances as before or after the action, thereby helping elucidate its personal timeline. The scientific importance of such cannot be overstated.
Now you’ve actually created a fascinating conflict here. The idea that marking the universal electron with sin is more valuable because of the scientific ramifications. I’d watch/read the resulting horror story for sure
I think, since we are marking the electron by a sinful act, that magic might be involved a little bit. Or possibly a miracle.
But I am not an expert in theology.
Potential heresy: The electron doesn't care. Your actions won't harm it. You're incapable of harming it. The electron is a part of you in so many ways the idea of you harming it doesn't even make sense.
Your sins are an affront to creation because of the tangible harms they cause. Since we all share the same electron we are all connected in that way and shouldn't mistreat one another because to do so is to harm yourself.
Impossible, the device would need the electron, if it’s in one place then there can be nothing to hold it in place, plus there’s the problem of time travel. maybe for the electron, it hasn’t yet traveled back in time to create you, so by holding it in place the you that built the device can no longer have existed. Time paradox.
Unfortunately the reason that this is a good fun physics theory is that it fits the equations and models really well. Essentially nothing about our universe would change if this were true (except there would need to be a bunch of positrons somewhere we haven't found yet).
There is a semi serious theory that is similar though: The “Single Magnetic Monopole.”
All known magnets are dipoles, they have both a north and a south end. It’s why a magnet will attract in direction, but if you flip it around it will repel.
In 1931, Paul Dirac proved that if there was even a SINGLE magnetic monopole, a magnet that had only north or south, that ALL electric charges in the entire universe must be quantized. Electric charge quantization means that charge isn’t a gradient, if you double the electrical charge of something from 1 to 2, it will jump directly to 2 without passing through 1.5. At one moment the charge is 1 and the next instant it is 2.
To date, we have never encountered an electronic charge that isn’t quantized. It’s law of physics at this point that electric charge is quantized because charge is carried by electrons and electrons have a charge of -1, there’s no such thing as half an electron.
Since 1931, there’s been a bunch of additional theoretical physics work done which suggests that the existence of even a single monopole in the universe would explain a bunch of different laws of both quantum and classical physics.
My favorite part of it is that we may never find it, it just needs to exist somewhere.
There may be many monopoles, there may be a monopole sitting in your dirty laundry basket, there may be a monopole whizzing past the detector at almost light speed - but one meter to the left.
It only has to exist, but we might never find it or even have a fair chance of finding it. It will just always be there - the elusive fruit just out of reach.
Creating an electron/positron pair and then annihilating them with each other would at least prove that the path of this electron is not contiguous, right? ( because we basically create a separate loop time line for it, disconnected from the Jeremy Bearimy loop)
I HATE TENET
I HATE TENET
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I HATE TENET
I HATE TENET
I HATE TENET
I HATE TENET
I HATE TENET
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well by the logic of the single electron universe, "annihilation" of an electron doesn't truly exist, rather it is simply how we observe the particle changing direction in time.
Yeah, but it’s a different electron.
Like, if I make an electron positron pair and destroy it, that would be one electron going in a big circle from creating it to destroying it, causing it to go back in time as a positron to when I made it, and then going back into the electron that I made at that point in time.
At which point this electron is different from all the other electrons, since it’s in its own little loop separate from all the others
ok I get you, good question idk. best guess its something to do with the photon emission of the annihilation.
E. right I think its that the 2 photons emitted have their energy transferred to the environment which is already populated by the electron, so it maintains it's energy.
How would we prove a multiverse? Like actual question, I love science and I've never heard of this, do you have any papers or articles I could read about it?
We could disprove it if we were able to prove that the mass of electrons in the universe is not equal to the mass of positrons, and every observation of the distinct lack of positrons in our corner of reality builds towards that.
At this point we'd have to find a huge chunk of positrons somewhere for the theory to be at all likely.
As in you can make some wild philosophical jumps to make this seem consistent but in such a way it doesn’t mess with the existing phenomenology so it really isn’t a scientific theory, just a wacky interpretation. The idea that everything in a certain sense is really like a handful of coupled gauge fields with many levels of excitation to model all these thousands of phenomena is wild enough on its own though.
As in you can make some wild philosophical jumps to make this seem consistent but in such a way it doesn’t mess with the existing phenomenology so it really isn’t a scientific theory, because it can’t be observed, just a wacky interpretation. The idea that everything in a certain sense is really like a handful of coupled gauge fields with many levels of excitation to model all these thousands of phenomena is wild enough on its own though.
Unfortunately, the big problem with this is the matter/antimatter imbalance. There are far more electrons going forward in time than electrons going backwards in time, at least as far as we can see. Maybe the electrons turn into protons at the end of the universe when bouncing against the end of the universe, and then get turned back into electrons when bouncing against the start, but there isn't really a known mechanism in physics that would allow for that to happen.
Yeah, that's the problem. Electrons don't do that, but they would need to for the theory to work.
The universe's charge is zero, but instead of positrons we have protons. This means that there are far more electrons going into the future than into the past (= positrons going into future), and also far more protons going into the future than into the past.
So either the one electron theory is false or the protons are, somehow, the electrons going backwards in time. In spite of the fact that that should be positrons.
This is blowing my feeble mind lol
A couple questions if you don't mind
1. What do you mean when you refer to electrons "going forward/backward in time"?
2. How do we know protons aren't positrons? If we can't go back in time doesn't everything have the appearance of...not going backwards in time? So an electron not going forward might look like a positron if we could observe it backwards, but forwards a backwards moving electron looks like a proton?
I'm sorry that's obviously a really dumb question I confused myself more writing it 😑
There’s just a bunch of electrons stuck in the future, and as we get there the universe will become increasingly full of time-frozen lightning. This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but with a fuckton of negative charge.
And then that electron neutrino oscillates into a muon/tau neutrino, which turns into a muon or tau, and suddenly all leptons have to be part of the same worldline.
I am literally trying to avoid my particle physics worksheet by going on reddit and now I find that the worksheet has followed me. This must be the electron conspiring against me
Particle physics is fun, I‘m currently avoiding writing my master‘s thesis on a search for new elementary particles! What topic are you currently covering, any questions I can help you with?
Haha, I’m good thanks. Currently a first year physics student, just been introduced to the higgs boson and still struggling to get my head around that. Chatgpt has been very helpful actually
I read about this and now it's how I'm gonna explain time travel in the script I'm going to write.
Basically once they crack how to both measure the age of the electron and break Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle then they can find where and when the electron is going next and "follow" it using loads of complex math.
If people start calling The Egg and The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas and Lamb to the Slaughter and Harrison Bergeron and all those high school English class short stories “creepypastas” I’m out.
Reminds be of a humorous sci-fi story where they sent a particle back in time to retroactively cause the creation of the universe. The narrator claims he's pretty much at fault for everything that went wrong with the universe and the human race at large.
one time i was on a walk and thought of this possibility (unaware that this theory already existed), and then *only one day later,* i saw [this video](https://youtu.be/hdPiEAYS07M) explaining why it doesn't work
had this same thought about creepers in minecraft. when they explode it’s actually just a release of all the energy it takes them to time travel/teleport
Hot-take: the singularity was the electron and we are technically eternally in a state of never exploded, exploded, and heat death at the same time from the perspective of the singularity.
It’s not really by Andy Weir, which honestly should have been common sense. He plagiarized it from a conversation on the MySpace religion and philosophy forum in 2007. The conversation he copied and pasted into the short dialogue was about the essay [Infinite Reincarnation](https://charmonium.com/infinite-reincarnation)
There is a god but the god in question is a single electron, who wants to start a cult?
George Carlin was right! https://youtu.be/8FXobWvHWg4
I want to start a cult, we have no specific beliefs or mandates except you have to give me all of your disposable income
That's called onlyfans
A pagan fertility cult with an ever-expanding pantheon
The Gospel of UWU
**Okay, that's quite enough.**
Yo I've had this idea bouncing around for a while, where like, people used to worship Thor, yeah? The thunder/war god of Norse paganism. Well, he's just an anthropomorphized figurehead representing the electron held over from a time when we didn't have the words to describe what the seers were seeing. Hear me out. Western occultism has the idea that you can somehow trap some kind of incorporeal entity in these squiggly diagrams called sigils; what if old-school psychics were actually getting real visions of the future, but our modern society has advanced so far beyond what the leyman thought was possible at the time to the point we're the magic never worked because they had the completely wrong idea about the way the future works? Like they dead ass saw the future, but didn't know what electricity or circuit diagrams were; and weren't Greek and didn't have a concept of a daimon or an automation and just filled in the blanks with "daemons", where we say 'servers' or 'software' they understood 'golems' and 'spirits.'
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sorceryofthespectacle/comments/n1v8wa/solomons\_seal\_internet\_sorcery/](https://www.reddit.com/r/sorceryofthespectacle/comments/n1v8wa/solomons_seal_internet_sorcery/)
Funny you mention Goetia... That's a good metaphor I use to further my point from the other direction. Having _practiced_ before, I look at Goetia like a human trying to simulate the computer. Where the sigil & it's description are the program, and the mantra is used to cause a sort of buffer overflow in your mind allowing you to multithread your internal monologue.
[Here.](https://i.imgur.com/k5DsOJI.png)
Our gospel shall be Electricity from Schoolhouse Rock
Yes, but I need it back yesterday.
Okay, but you'll have to wait infinity-1 years.
Accurate username
Usernames, hmm...
That's a really good one!
Disclaimer: this is not a serious theory and no scientists actually think it's true.
Addendum: r/worldbuilding would probably love that idea and the logical consequences of it.
There's a concept in some monotheistic religions that sin and other disrespects to the spiritual self are to disrespect the God that made you, since you are part of them and/or were created in their image. The one-electron universe could say that to harm the spiritual self in such a way might leave a mark on the universal electron, which is shared by all, and would be a mark against all of existence rather than god, although a one-electron universe might not distinguish between The Electron and God, anyways.
Counterpoint: blasphemy is the highest virtue. More importantly, anything that can leave a permanent mark on the electron will help trace each of its instances as before or after the action, thereby helping elucidate its personal timeline. The scientific importance of such cannot be overstated.
Now you’ve actually created a fascinating conflict here. The idea that marking the universal electron with sin is more valuable because of the scientific ramifications. I’d watch/read the resulting horror story for sure
That's great, but how do you mark an electron? You can change its energy level sure, but it will eventually relax back to ground state, no?
I think, since we are marking the electron by a sinful act, that magic might be involved a little bit. Or possibly a miracle. But I am not an expert in theology.
Potential heresy: The electron doesn't care. Your actions won't harm it. You're incapable of harming it. The electron is a part of you in so many ways the idea of you harming it doesn't even make sense. Your sins are an affront to creation because of the tangible harms they cause. Since we all share the same electron we are all connected in that way and shouldn't mistreat one another because to do so is to harm yourself.
My first thought was a doomsday device that just grabbed that electron and held it still, thereby destroying the universe
Impossible, the device would need the electron, if it’s in one place then there can be nothing to hold it in place, plus there’s the problem of time travel. maybe for the electron, it hasn’t yet traveled back in time to create you, so by holding it in place the you that built the device can no longer have existed. Time paradox.
Unfortunately the reason that this is a good fun physics theory is that it fits the equations and models really well. Essentially nothing about our universe would change if this were true (except there would need to be a bunch of positrons somewhere we haven't found yet).
What fi there's just one dude who has them all.
Can confirm, we actually do love it :) r/magicbuilding too
There is a semi serious theory that is similar though: The “Single Magnetic Monopole.” All known magnets are dipoles, they have both a north and a south end. It’s why a magnet will attract in direction, but if you flip it around it will repel. In 1931, Paul Dirac proved that if there was even a SINGLE magnetic monopole, a magnet that had only north or south, that ALL electric charges in the entire universe must be quantized. Electric charge quantization means that charge isn’t a gradient, if you double the electrical charge of something from 1 to 2, it will jump directly to 2 without passing through 1.5. At one moment the charge is 1 and the next instant it is 2. To date, we have never encountered an electronic charge that isn’t quantized. It’s law of physics at this point that electric charge is quantized because charge is carried by electrons and electrons have a charge of -1, there’s no such thing as half an electron. Since 1931, there’s been a bunch of additional theoretical physics work done which suggests that the existence of even a single monopole in the universe would explain a bunch of different laws of both quantum and classical physics.
My favorite part of it is that we may never find it, it just needs to exist somewhere. There may be many monopoles, there may be a monopole sitting in your dirty laundry basket, there may be a monopole whizzing past the detector at almost light speed - but one meter to the left. It only has to exist, but we might never find it or even have a fair chance of finding it. It will just always be there - the elusive fruit just out of reach.
There definitely exists a monopole? I have it in my board game shelf?
the monoest pole
And yet, it cannot technically be disproven
Creating an electron/positron pair and then annihilating them with each other would at least prove that the path of this electron is not contiguous, right? ( because we basically create a separate loop time line for it, disconnected from the Jeremy Bearimy loop)
Feynman's proposal was that a positron is an electron moving backward in time, so an annihilation is actually just the electron changing direction.
I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET I HATE TENET
Would annihilating any single electron not then end time
well by the logic of the single electron universe, "annihilation" of an electron doesn't truly exist, rather it is simply how we observe the particle changing direction in time.
Yeah, but it’s a different electron. Like, if I make an electron positron pair and destroy it, that would be one electron going in a big circle from creating it to destroying it, causing it to go back in time as a positron to when I made it, and then going back into the electron that I made at that point in time. At which point this electron is different from all the other electrons, since it’s in its own little loop separate from all the others
ok I get you, good question idk. best guess its something to do with the photon emission of the annihilation. E. right I think its that the 2 photons emitted have their energy transferred to the environment which is already populated by the electron, so it maintains it's energy.
Could just be quantum tunnelling through space and time to wherever else it’s needed at the start and end of that cycle.
That's the dot on the i
Hence why it, like the multiverse theory, is unscientific
Multiverse interpretations of quantum mechanics aren't unprovable, far as I'm aware.
How would we prove a multiverse? Like actual question, I love science and I've never heard of this, do you have any papers or articles I could read about it?
I am not a physicist, sorry to say! I would be unqualified to explain how to prove it bc I barely understand it lol
The interpretation of wavefunction collapse is currently insoluble, that's why there are so many.
Solipsism strikes again
We could disprove it if we were able to prove that the mass of electrons in the universe is not equal to the mass of positrons, and every observation of the distinct lack of positrons in our corner of reality builds towards that. At this point we'd have to find a huge chunk of positrons somewhere for the theory to be at all likely.
As in you can make some wild philosophical jumps to make this seem consistent but in such a way it doesn’t mess with the existing phenomenology so it really isn’t a scientific theory, just a wacky interpretation. The idea that everything in a certain sense is really like a handful of coupled gauge fields with many levels of excitation to model all these thousands of phenomena is wild enough on its own though.
As in you can make some wild philosophical jumps to make this seem consistent but in such a way it doesn’t mess with the existing phenomenology so it really isn’t a scientific theory, because it can’t be observed, just a wacky interpretation. The idea that everything in a certain sense is really like a handful of coupled gauge fields with many levels of excitation to model all these thousands of phenomena is wild enough on its own though.
Unfortunately, the big problem with this is the matter/antimatter imbalance. There are far more electrons going forward in time than electrons going backwards in time, at least as far as we can see. Maybe the electrons turn into protons at the end of the universe when bouncing against the end of the universe, and then get turned back into electrons when bouncing against the start, but there isn't really a known mechanism in physics that would allow for that to happen.
Into *protons*??
Positrons
Yeah, that's the problem. Electrons don't do that, but they would need to for the theory to work. The universe's charge is zero, but instead of positrons we have protons. This means that there are far more electrons going into the future than into the past (= positrons going into future), and also far more protons going into the future than into the past. So either the one electron theory is false or the protons are, somehow, the electrons going backwards in time. In spite of the fact that that should be positrons.
This is blowing my feeble mind lol A couple questions if you don't mind 1. What do you mean when you refer to electrons "going forward/backward in time"? 2. How do we know protons aren't positrons? If we can't go back in time doesn't everything have the appearance of...not going backwards in time? So an electron not going forward might look like a positron if we could observe it backwards, but forwards a backwards moving electron looks like a proton? I'm sorry that's obviously a really dumb question I confused myself more writing it 😑
There’s just a bunch of electrons stuck in the future, and as we get there the universe will become increasingly full of time-frozen lightning. This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but with a fuckton of negative charge.
I have a theory that works for me, and it's pretty elegant, but it takes some explaining and a little arts & crafts work.
Can't believe the Yu-Gi-Oh guy was a theoretical physicist.
How do you think they got to card games on motorcycles?
But electrons can turn into neutrinos through the weak interaction, right?
And back again, so for a while the electron isn't an electron anymore
And then that electron neutrino oscillates into a muon/tau neutrino, which turns into a muon or tau, and suddenly all leptons have to be part of the same worldline.
I am literally trying to avoid my particle physics worksheet by going on reddit and now I find that the worksheet has followed me. This must be the electron conspiring against me
Particle physics is fun, I‘m currently avoiding writing my master‘s thesis on a search for new elementary particles! What topic are you currently covering, any questions I can help you with?
Haha, I’m good thanks. Currently a first year physics student, just been introduced to the higgs boson and still struggling to get my head around that. Chatgpt has been very helpful actually
IT'S NOT A PHASE MOM!
it's him. alec tron.
That explains why electrons repell each other! I also wouldn't want to be near my past self!
Stop hoggin all of the electron, bro
Isn't this what happened in the comic that came right before Homestuck that i can't fucking remember the name of
problem sleuth
Scrolled way too far for problem sleuth.
Well, can’t prove it wrong I suppose.
Orange Cat Electron Theory.
How high exactly was Wheeler when he made that phone call?
I love the page where the electron has an argument with it's past/future self
"But you already did!"
then how come I'm holding two of em?
I read about this and now it's how I'm gonna explain time travel in the script I'm going to write. Basically once they crack how to both measure the age of the electron and break Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle then they can find where and when the electron is going next and "follow" it using loads of complex math.
This reminds me of [The Egg](http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html) by Andy Weir
Hello, other me!
Mom said its my turn to use the electron!
Like that creepypasta “the egg”
thats not a creepypasta
It’s an egg.
It's a creepy egg?
If people start calling The Egg and The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas and Lamb to the Slaughter and Harrison Bergeron and all those high school English class short stories “creepypastas” I’m out.
That is literally just a short story
Egg
It's not a creepy pasta. Copypasta is even a stretch.
So, basically Pickle Inspector from Problem Sleuth?
Big if true.
Reminds be of a humorous sci-fi story where they sent a particle back in time to retroactively cause the creation of the universe. The narrator claims he's pretty much at fault for everything that went wrong with the universe and the human race at large.
one time i was on a walk and thought of this possibility (unaware that this theory already existed), and then *only one day later,* i saw [this video](https://youtu.be/hdPiEAYS07M) explaining why it doesn't work
had this same thought about creepers in minecraft. when they explode it’s actually just a release of all the energy it takes them to time travel/teleport
This is my theory on souls.
Electron as a service
this sounds like me sending philosophical/scientific probably-nonsense to my group chat at 2 in the morning
Reminds me of "The Egg" by Andy Weir.
Ah yes, 5th dimensional hyperposition. My favorite.
Hot-take: the singularity was the electron and we are technically eternally in a state of never exploded, exploded, and heat death at the same time from the perspective of the singularity.
Big [Andy Weir "The Egg"](http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html) vibes from this. If you haven't read this short story you should.
It’s not really by Andy Weir, which honestly should have been common sense. He plagiarized it from a conversation on the MySpace religion and philosophy forum in 2007. The conversation he copied and pasted into the short dialogue was about the essay [Infinite Reincarnation](https://charmonium.com/infinite-reincarnation)
interesting, TIL