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In Reply to: RE: Ahh woundn't the negative ions, allow more freely available electrons to be 'around' ?? posted by unclestu on May 23, 2011 at 13:08:33
"By the quantum theory, electrons behave both as a wave and as a particle. In its wave state electrons can traverse large distances almost instantaneously (speed of light essentially, and unmeasurable). The unique thing, as revealed by the famous, or infamous double slit experiment is that electrons ( and a few other subatomic particles) can appear simultaneous in more than one location, the wave nature making the electron appearance defined by probabilities rather than an exact location."Actually, none of what is contained in that paragraph is true.
Some electrons travel quite slowly; the "drift velocity" of electrons in wires conducting electricity is only around 1 Meter/Hour. The Fermi velocity of free electrons in metals is on the order of 1 or 2 million meters/sec, considerable slower that the speed of light (which we all know is 300,000 kilometers/sec).
Your statement that the velocity of electrons is "unmeasurable" is also not true. (As we all should know) the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle stipulates that the electron's velocity AND its momentum cannot be *simultaneously* measured with a high degree of certainty. But either velocity or momentum of the electron CAN be measured with a high degree of certainty.
Finally, again sadly for your argument, the double-slit experiment with electrons demonstrated that electrons act as waves as well as particles, but it was the electrons' waves interfering with each other that produces the "interference pattern" on the screen in front of the double slits, not that the electrons are appearing in two places simultaneously.
Even in the single slit experiment the pattern formed on the screen is not due to the electrons being in more than one place at a time, it's due to the diffraction of the electrons by the slit. The uncertainty of positon doesn't refer to the electron being able to be in two locations at once. In order to pass through the slit, the electron has to have a known position, with uncertainty equal to the width of the slit. However, to get through the slit, the electron interacts with the quantized atoms of the slit material, producing a scattering into a range of directions, thus destroying the certainty in x-component of momentum.
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