Electron

The electron is the lightest stable electrically charged particle known, discovered by J. J. Thomson at the end of the nineteenth century and the carrier of electric current, of chemical bonding and of most of what is ordinarily called electricity. In mainstream physics it is a structureless point: a lepton of the Standard Model, an excitation of a quantum field, with charge −e, spin ½, a magnetic moment slightly larger than the Dirac value (the "anomalous" moment), and no measured size — scattering experiments are read as placing an upper bound on its radius rather than as revealing a shape. Its behaviour is described by the Dirac equation and by quantum electrodynamics, and its apparent wave properties are treated as intrinsic to a wave-particle duality that is not further analysed.

The literature collected on this wiki disputes almost every part of that description, and it does so with unusual persistence: the electron is one of the most heavily worked topics in the archive. The common complaint is not that quantum electrodynamics computes badly — its numerical success is generally conceded — but that a point particle with a finite charge, a finite spin and a finite magnetic moment is not a physical object at all. A point has no volume in which to store energy, no radius about which to spin, and no current loop with which to generate a magnetic moment; the classical self-energy of a point charge is infinite, and the infinity is removed by renormalisation rather than by explanation. Einstein's remark, quoted repeatedly in these papers — "I would just like to know what an electron is" — serves as the standing motto of the whole enterprise.

What follows sets out the mainstream account briefly, then the distinct families of alternative electron model found in the papers archived here, then the experimental and interpretive challenges those researchers raise. The alternatives are not one position. Ring theorists, wave-structure theorists and aether-flow theorists disagree with one another as sharply as any of them disagrees with the Standard Model.

The point-particle assumption and its critics

The objection to the point electron is older than the wiki and older than the Standard Model. Arthur Holly Compton's two 1919 papers, The Size and Shape of the Electron: I. The Scattering of High Frequency Radiation and The Size and Shape of the Electron: II. The Absorption of High Frequency Radiation, are archived here as the founding documents of the extended-electron tradition. Compton called attention to two discrepancies between experiment and the scattering theory built "upon the hypothesis of a sensibly point charge electron": the observed mass scattering coefficient for very hard X-rays and gamma rays falls to as little as a quarter of the theoretical floor, and the front-back asymmetry of scattering from a thin plate is not what a sub-wavelength scatterer would produce. His conclusion was that the electron has a size and a shape, and he proposed a toroidal ring.

David L Bergman has made the case against the point particle the centre of a long research programme conducted through Common Sense Science. In Models of the Electron (1999) he traces how the classical physicists who discovered the electron immediately built models for it and tested them, and how that practice was abandoned. In Modeling the Real Structure of an Electron (2010) he sets out the criterion explicitly: the actual properties of the electron are compared with the properties of the point-like models used in relativity theory, quantum mechanics and the Dirac theory of the atom, and the comparison shows that only a model of finite size can account for charge, mass, spin and magnetic moment together. In The Troubled Theories of Magnetic Induction (2005) he draws the practical consequence: once protons and electrons are granted volume, forces that mainstream treatment can only describe by what he calls "useful fictions" follow from the fundamental force laws directly. Matter Waves (1999) puts the epistemic point in a parable — the consensus on the dual nature of the electron resembles two blind men agreeing that an elephant is both a rope and a tree.

The history of the extended-object tradition, from Thomson through Dehmelt to MacGregor, is reviewed in Mirjana Bozic and Dusan Arsenovic's On a Relativistic Magnetic Top (1997), which contrasts the arguments of the model-builders with Pauli's assertion that spin is "a classically non-explainable two-valuedness" and with Dirac's theory of a point electron. Roland H Dishington states the methodological position of the whole group in The Extended Electron (1998): if a theory has no picture to illustrate it, then constructing one and backing it with the simplest possible mathematics is the shortest route to new understanding.

Ring, toroidal and helicon models

The largest single family of models in the archive gives the electron the shape of a ring, torus or helix carrying charge that circulates at the speed of light. The ring is chosen because it is the geometry that makes spin and magnetic moment mechanical rather than postulated.

The best developed version is Bergman's Spinning Charged Ring model, first published with Paul Wesley as Spinning Charged Ring Model of Electron Yielding Anomalous Magnetic Moment (1990). Four parameters — the radius of the ring, its half-thickness, the total charge and a tangential velocity equal to c — are fixed so as to reproduce the four measured characteristics of the electron: its mass, its charge, its spin h/2 and its magnetic moment. The model is reported to be completely stable under electromagnetic forces alone, requiring no additional binding force; the size of the electron comes out equal to the rationalised Compton wavelength and the frequency of rotation to the Compton frequency. Its most-cited claim is that the factor of two in the electron's gyromagnetic ratio, which the Dirac theory supplies formally, follows here from the geometry. Bergman restated the model in New Spinning Charged Ring Model of the Electron (1992) and extended it with Dennis P. Allen in Electron in the Ground Energy State – Part 1 and Part 2 (2012), where the exact distribution of charge density inside the ring is derived from electromagnetic self-forces and the model is reported to yield the rest-mass energy and the electron–positron annihilation energy of 510,999 electron-volts.

Bergman later generalised the ring into the Helicon model — a toroidal helical structure of one or more charge fibres — and applied it to the proton and neutron as well. Observations of the Properties of Physical Entities Part 2 - Shape and Size of Electron, Proton and Neutron (2004) argues that a careful reading of the scattering experiments of Compton and Robert Hofstadter gives precise agreement with the thin flexible ring the model predicts, and Fine-Structure Properties of the Electron, Proton and Neutron (2006) reports properties calculated to about five significant figures, together with an account of neutron beta-decay that Bergman says accounts for all mass, energy and angular momentum "without necessitating the insertion of a neutrino." Physical Models for Elementary Particles, Atoms and Nuclei (1997) states the general programme, and Glen C Collins's Physical Models for Sub-Atomic Particles and Atomic Structure (2002) presents the Helicon theory of atomic and sub-atomic structure as Common Sense Science's replacement for the standard account.

Independently, Robert L Carroll derived a toroidal electron in The Toroidal Electron (1991) by admitting half-integer separation constants in the general wave equation for matter, obtaining electrons and positrons each with two types of spin and an internal circulation velocity equal to c when the particle is at rest and dependent on translational velocity otherwise. Alvaro Q. Valenzuela's A Classic Electron Ring Model (1994) presents a Compton-sized ring rotating at the speed of light, stable under electric and magnetic forces, reproducing the mass and magnetic moment, and displaying the same logarithmic singularity in its mass that quantum electrodynamics produces.

Philipp M Kanarev arrived at a ring from spectroscopy rather than from electrodynamics. Model of the Electron (2000) reinterprets the physical content of Planck's constant so as to give access to the electromagnetic structure of the electron; A Model for the Free Electron (2002) reports that analysis of experimental spectroscopy makes the electron's wavelength equal to the radius of its ring model; and Planck's Constant and a Model for the Electron (2006) develops the electron as a rotating hollow torus stabilised by two rotations at once — one about the axis through the geometrical centre, and a vortical rotation about the circular axis through the cross-section centre.

Jaroslav G Klyushin uses the same double rotation but assigns it different work: in Neutron Construction (2006) the equatorial rotation of the torus defines electric charge and the meridional rotation defines spin, with the handedness of the two angular-velocity vectors fixing the sign of the charge. Francis Viren Fernandes also makes the electron a torus, in The Structure of an Electron (2009), but embeds it in an ether ontology: an electron is a type of photon, toroidal rings align to form a fibre, and the fibre's tube is filled with what he calls 186-ether, whose rotation velocity he identifies with the von Klitzing constant.

Related structured models in the archive include Horace R Drew's four-dimensional helix or stationary wave of spin-½ symmetry in A Periodic Structural Model for the Electron Can Calculate its Intrinsic Properties to an Accuracy of Second or Third Order (2002), stabilised in a Casimir sense by inward vacuum pressure balancing outward inertial motion; Daniel H Deutsch's Electromechanical Physical Models of the Electron, Proton, Neutron, and Neutrino (1991), which starts from h as a quantum of angular momentum rather than of action and builds particles from rotating dipoles of massless point charges tied to the fine-structure constant; Thomas N Lockyer's vector particle physics in The Precise Positron and Electron (2010), where spin angular momentum arises from conservation of the structure photon's linear momentum in the particle geometry; Pavel Sladkov's Solitonic Model of the Electron, Proton, and Neutron (2010), a rotating soliton of monochromatic waves confined in a spherical shell; Bill Stubbs's A Model of the Electron Based on Its Magnetic Moment (2012), which improves on the hollow-sphere approximation behind the Bohr magneton by treating the electron as a small charge in a rapid orbit; Manfred Geilhaupt and John Wilcoxen's Electron, Universe, and the Large Numbers Between (2008), a finite model whose internal dynamics they read as Riemannian geometry; and William R. Hohenberger's Aethereal Fractal Structures for the Electron & Proton (2012). Reinhold Gerharz's "A Relationship Between Magnetic Moment and Particle Radius" (1989) postulates the electron as two counter-directional circulating electromagnetic fields and derives the radius–magnetic-moment relation through the Compton wavelength and the Sommerfeld fine structure.

Rati Ram Sharma takes the compositional route rather than the geometric one. In Unified Theory Composition-Structure of Electron, Proton & Neutron (2010) he argues that nothing in the Standard Model's inventory of elementary particles actually satisfies the definition of an element, and composes the electron instead from new sub-elements he calls cosminos — positrino and negatrino — with stated diameter, mass, charge and spin.

The spinning point: Rivas's kinematical model

A distinctive middle position is held by Martin Rivas, whose On the Space-Time Structure of the Electron (1993–1994) and The Spinning Electron (2005) develop a classical model of a spinning electron within a kinematical formalism in which the kinematical space, rather than the phase space, is required to be a homogeneous space of the space-time group. The result is not an extended body: the charge remains concentrated at a single point. But that point is never at rest — it moves in circles at the speed of light around the centre of mass, which does not coincide with it. Spin is produced by this zitterbewegung together with rotation about the centre of mass, and the separation of charge from centre of mass gives the electron its dipole structure. Rivas reports that the model satisfies Dirac's equation when quantised, which places it as a classical underpinning of the Dirac theory rather than a rejection of it.

Wave-structure models

A second major family denies that the electron is a body of any shape and makes it a standing-wave structure in space.

Milo M Wolff is the principal exponent. Beyond the Point Particle: A Wave Structure for the Electron (1995) proposes that the electron consists entirely of a configuration of waves whose behaviour creates its particle-like appearance — a structure Wolff calls a Space Resonance — and argues that quantum theory, special relativity, the electric force, gravity and magnetism all originate from that wave structure rather than being imposed on it. In The Wave Structure of Electron Spin (2008) spin is given a specific mechanism: it is a spherical rotation in quantum space by which the inward quantum waves converging on the wave-centre become the outward waves, a rotation describable by SU(2) group algebra, which Wolff reports agrees completely with Dirac's spin and exhibits the physical origin of the Dirac equation. Light and the Electron - Einstein's Last Question (2006), with Geoff Haselhurst, and Einstein's Last Question: What is an Electron? (2010) present light as an energy exchange between electrons rather than a stream of objects, and take Einstein's question as the organising problem of physics.

Werner A Hofer's Internal Structures of Electrons and Photons and some Consequences in Relativistic Physics (1997) argues that both quantum mechanics and de Broglie–Bohm mechanics take a merely formal approach to microphysics, and that on a realistic approach the internal structure of particles satisfies a wave equation from which the Schrödinger equation follows when external potentials are included — with the uncertainty relations expressing an arbitrariness introduced by internal energy components. Electrons and photons on his account are describable by an identical formalism. William M Honig's Direct Calculation of h and of the Complete Self Energy of the Electron From Fluid Models (1994) derives Planck's constant and the complete self-energy of the electron from a dual fluid plenum that retains relativistic invariance. Erich Wanek's "The Particlewave: A New Model for Light and the Matter Waves" (2008) ascribes both particle-like and wave-like behaviour to an array of subparticles oscillating perpendicular to the direction of motion, tracing a helix or double helix.

Space-vortex and aether models

A third family treats the electron not as an object in space but as a structure of space — a vortex, a sink, or a void in a plenum.

Paramahamsa Tewari's "On the Space-Vortex Structure of the Electron" (2005) revives the Cartesian programme explicitly, taking space as a property-less fluid entity in which vortices of different sizes aggregate into matter and in which gravity arises from the pressure and impact of the medium on bodies. Roland H Dishington inverts the picture: in The Extended Electron (1998) and Kinetic Energy, Momentum and Inertia (1998) the electron is a zone of depletion in the aether bounded by a standing wave, all energy is derived from distortions of the electron, and energy is therefore wholly electric in nature.

David Tombe has developed the most extensive aether-flow account in the archive. On his model, set out across The Aether and the Electric Sea (2006), The DNA of Electromagnetic Radiation (The Electron-Positron Dipole) (2006) and The Richness and Quality of the Electron-Positron Dipole (2006), space is a dynamic aethereal medium in which electrons are sinks and positrons are sources; negative and positive charge are simply measures of the rate of flow into the sinks and out of the sources. Standard hydrodynamics then yields the irrotational radial inflow that is the inverse-square Coulomb force, plus three further components of force. The basic physical unit is not the isolated electron but the rotating electron–positron dipole, in which aether flows out of the positron, crosses over and sinks into the electron, producing a swirling vortex with the two particles acting as rolling idle wheels. From that unit Tombe reconstructs the magnetic field as a solenoidal double helix of sinks and sources — The Double Helix Theory of the Magnetic Field (2006) and A Solenoidal Double Helix of Sinks and Sources (2008) — and reads Maxwell's molecular vortices as arrays of such dipoles in Maxwell's Original Equations (2011) and The Coriolis Force in Maxwell's Equations (2010). The Key that Winds Up the Universe (2009) treats the rotating dipole as the source of all mass, energy and angular momentum.

Jaroslav G Klyushin gives the aether a mechanical rather than a topological role: Electron Dynamics in Ether (2002) and On Electron Movement in Ether (2005) propose that a charge q moving with speed V experiences a resistance force from the ether, which is the essential difference between the motion of a charged and an uncharged body and which he uses to explain effects usually called relativistic together with the need for external energy to sustain a steady current.

Stoyan Sarg's A Physical Model of the Electron According to the Basic Structures of Matter Hypothesis (2003) builds the electron from an underlying grid of nodes formed of superdense sub-elementary particles filling the physical vacuum; the vibrating grid possesses quantum features and an energy well, and Sarg suggests it also accounts for the missing mass attributed to Dark Matter. David W. Thomson and Jim D. Bourassa's Electron Binding Energies in the Aether Physics Model (2007) derives a complete periodic-table ground-state binding-energy equation from their Aether Physics Model. Guy Grantham and Menahem Simhony's The Fabric of Space as an Electron-Positron Lattice and Implications for GRT (2010) treats the vacuum as a solid lattice of bound electrons and positrons — the "epola," analogous to a polycrystalline ionic salt — and reads the curvature of space in general relativity, along with gravitation, inertia and de Broglie waves, as electromagnetic effects of that lattice; the companion paper "Implications of an Electron-Positron-Lattice Model of Space for EM Waves" (2010) extends it to the electromagnetic spectrum. A H Brady's Vacuum Energy Density and the Mechanism of Gravity (1994) makes the same identification from the gravitational side, assuming the vacuum to be a cold plasma of a conserved boson lattice of electron–positron pairs, calculating the experimental value of G from it, and proposing those pairs as the dark matter of the universe.

For the wider medium literature see Aether.

The Four Universal Motions: one particle in four motions

The most far-reaching claim about the electron made on this wiki is that it is not a distinct particle at all. The Four Universal Motions in Physics (2024), by the father-and-son team Robert de Hilster and David de Hilster, holds that the electron, the photon, the graviton and the magnetron are all the same particle, and that what distinguishes them is not their nature but their motion. The model is an extension of the Particle Model and is set out in Principia Mathematica 2.

In this account the universe is filled with vast numbers of small, fast bodies — the G1 particles — travelling at the speed of light, and the four forces we observe are four patterns in which those particles move:

Gravitic motion — random straight-line motion in all directions. Gravity is the push produced when two bodies mutually shadow one another from the surrounding flux. The particle in this motion is what is otherwise called the graviton.
Magnetic motion — orbiting, circular motion. A magnetic field is G1 particles caught in orbits, around nuclei or in far larger loops. The particle in this motion is the magnetron.
Luminic motion — groups of particles travelling together in the same direction at the same speed, the grouping giving light its wavelength. The particle in this motion is the photon.
Electric motion — directional flow along a non-orbital path guided by many aligned masses, a "gravitic tube" such as the copper nuclei in a wire. The particle in this motion is the electron.

The consequence for the electron is a sharp one. The electron is not a species of matter with its own mass, size and charge, to be modelled as a ring, a vortex or a standing wave; it is the same universal particle that, moving differently, constitutes light, magnetism and gravity. The model states explicitly that the particles in electric motion carry no charge — electric current, the magnetic field around a wire, and the electromagnetic waves it radiates are all the identical G1 particles in different patterns of motion. This sets the Four Universal Motions apart from every other alternative surveyed on this page: the structured-electron models ask what shape the electron has, while this model denies that there is a separate object there to be shaped.

The claim also dissolves, rather than answers, several of the problems treated elsewhere in this article. Wave–particle duality does not arise, because the wave is a pattern in the motion of a stream of particles rather than a property of a single one. Action at a distance does not arise, because every force is a contact interaction. Inertia is reinterpreted as the sustaining effect of random impacts from the surrounding gravitic field rather than an internal property of the moving body.

The model takes univironmental determinism, the doctrine formulated by Glenn Borchardt, as a foundational principle: what happens to any portion of the universe depends equally on the matter in motion within it and the matter in motion outside it. Its gravitic motion places it in the push gravity tradition running from Fatio de Duillier and Le Sage, and its magnetic motion rests on the underwater cylinder experiments of Ionel Dinu — the Dinu effect — in which rotating cylinders attract or repel according to their relative direction of spin, reproducing magnetic behaviour with no magnet present.

Main article: The Four Universal Motions in Physics. See also the theory's website, fourmotions.org.

The anomalous magnetic moment and the gyromagnetic ratio

The electron's magnetic moment is the sharpest quantitative battleground in this archive, because it is where quantum electrodynamics is at its most successful and where the alternative models make their most direct claim.

Bergman's ring models attack the word "anomalous" itself. The 1990 Bergman–Wesley paper explains the twice-classical gyromagnetic ratio as a consequence of the ring geometry, and Bergman and Allen's 2012 papers report that the Spinning Charged Ring model yields "the actual, non-anomalous" magnetic moment — the position being that the moment only looks anomalous when it is measured against a point-particle baseline that was never physical.

A M Awobode takes a different route, staying within a Dirac framework but modifying it. A New Appraisal of the Relativistic Quantum (1997) reports that an additional term introduced into the Dirac theory permits approximate calculation of the gyromagnetic ratio and the Lamb shift, and — the advantage he presses — a consistent calculation of the precessional frequencies of helicity and angular momenta. The Anomalous Magnetic Moment of the Electron (2002) obtains g greater than 2 from the non-relativistic limit of an extended Dirac Hamiltonian coupled to a magnetic field, in contrast with Dirac's own prediction of exactly 2. The Electron Gyromagnetic Ratio Corresponding to Orbital Magnetism (2006) makes a testable prediction in the other direction: the orbital gyromagnetic ratio should be less than one, g_L = 1 − 0.0016. Gordon L Ziegler's "A New Way to Calculate Electron and Muon g/2-factors" (2006) proposes to extend the known two terms to an infinite series from a boson-aether particle model in which charge is divided into 1, ½, ¼ and ⅛ of e rather than into thirds.

A separate line questions whether the magnetic field of moving electrons is what it is taken to be at all. Christian Sutterlin's Electron beams magnetic field is not a result of electron motion but of their intrinsic magnetic moment (2014), following his earlier "Electron beams magnetic field" (2000), argues that the field around an electron beam is produced by the intrinsic moments of the electrons rather than by their translation. John R Warfield reaches a comparable conclusion from magnetism: A New Model of the Electron that Unifies Classic Physics with Quantum Mechanics (2009) argues that the physical shape of a free electron's magnetic field is not that of a dipole, and the companion paper on permanent magnetism proposes that a permanent magnet's field is produced by many solenoid-like superconducting circular electron currents, so that the dipole model of the electron is not needed to explain it. Johann Marinsek's "Physics Q: Magnetic Moments Not Due to Valence Electrons" (2008) revisits the Stern–Gerlach experiments for H and H₂ and challenges the attribution of the observed moments to valence electrons.

Wave-particle duality, diffraction and the double slit

The archive is unusually rich in attempts to dissolve rather than accept the duality of the electron.

Petr Beckmann's The Double-Slit Paradox (1990) derives directly from Maxwell's equations that the velocity of an electron moving with average v oscillates about that value, giving rise to a non-radiating electromagnetic wave in the electron's neighbourhood whose oscillations are characterised by the de Broglie relation — a relation normally postulated rather than derived. The paradox then dissolves mechanically: the electron passes through one aperture only, while the wave surrounding it is diffracted by both.

Berthold W Schumacher's Questions Touching on the Fundamentals of Physics and Deserving an Answer (1988) reaches a similar destination by a different argument. Analogies comparing electrons to macroscopic bullets, he objects, cannot be taken seriously, because an electron is inherently associated with its Coulomb field: approaching a slit, it "sends its field ahead" and thereby "sees" the geometry of the structure, inducing currents in the screen before it arrives. He notes that such alternative explanations have apparently never been investigated.

Vesselin C Noninski's A Quantum Mechanical Measurement Leading to Simultaneous Spin-Up and Spin-Down State of a Single Electron (2003) presses on the singlet state: two observers making simultaneous measurements on a spin-½ pair can obtain an outcome that lacks physical meaning, which he takes to put in question the physical meaning of the singlet state and the exotic notions, such as non-locality, that are drawn from it. Bill Gaede's "Light: Neither Particle nor Transverse Wave" (2005) argues that mathematical theories dealing exclusively in relations and concepts are in principle powerless to describe the shape of a physical object, and proposes architectures for light, the atom and the universe in place of the photon and the wave.

The orbiting electron and the radiation problem

Why an orbiting electron does not spiral into the nucleus is the classical objection that made quantum mechanics necessary; several researchers here argue that it was never a genuine obstacle.

Jan Olof Jonson argues in Why an Orbiting Electron Does Not Collapse into the Nucleus (2000) and Towards a Classical Explanation to the Stable Electron Paths around Nuclei and to Radiation in Connection with the De-Excitation of Excited Electrons (2004) that if the electron's speed is constant and all forces upon it are perpendicular to its motion, no net work is done, no energy is lost, and the orbit persists — a result that requires the non-existence of certain assumed forces, and that he extends in Photon as a Classical Wave Packet from Classically Stabilized Electron Orbits (2007) to the emission of light. Adam R Brute's An Equilibrium Orbital Electron (1997) proposes that an orbital electron could be placed in a physical state equivalent to straight-line motion, and so escape radiative decay.

Philipp M Kanarev rejects the orbit outright. Electrons in Atoms (2002) argues that the mathematical model of the law of formation of atomic and ionic spectra contains no orbital component of the electron's energy of movement, so that "the concept of the orbital movement of the electron in the atom becomes a myth"; in its place he proposes a precession of the electrons about the nuclei, with valence electrons joining atoms into molecules through their unlike magnetic poles. He extends the same framework to the photoelectric effect in "The New Interpretation of Photoeffect" (2004) and to bond energies in his papers on the fusion of oxygen, water and ozone molecules. Bing-Xin Gong's "A Classical Approach to the Photoelectric Effect & Photoelectron Emission" (2007) reanalyses the photoelectric effect in classical electrodynamics and identifies limitations in Einstein's photon hypothesis; Bergman's Electron Wave Function: Electromagnetic Waves Emitted by Ring Electrons (2005) compares the Schrödinger equation with the ring model on their ability to predict the waves electrons actually emit, and argues that the wave function cannot be interpreted as a physical wave.

Koshun Suto approaches atomic structure through mass rather than orbit: True Nature of Potential Energy of a Hydrogen Atom (2009) offers the hypothesis that the potential energy of a hydrogen atom corresponds to a decrease in the electron's rest mass energy, and finds an off-limit boundary r_c inside the electron; Theoretical Prediction of the Size of a Proton and Revision of the Rydberg Formula (2008) develops the same reasoning into a revision of the Rydberg formula. Tolga Yarman's work on diatomic molecules relates the classical vibration period to mass and to the size of the space concerned, and extends the relation to the quantum numbers of electronic states.

Electron mass and inertia

Several researchers here treat the electron's mass as a derived or variable quantity rather than a primitive constant.

The most striking experimental claim is V F Mikhailov's. The Action of an Electrostatic Potential on the Electron Mass (1999) reports that the electron's mass changes when it is placed anywhere inside a charged spherical shell at Coulomb potential U — a field-free region, so that on standard electrodynamics nothing should happen. He confirmed the effect twice more, in "Influence of an Electrostatic Potential on the Inertial Electron Mass" (2001), where the linear variation of the frequency of a Barkhausen–Kurz generator with the applied voltage is the observable and the predicted effect is derived from Weber's electromagnetic theory, and in Influence of a Field-less Electrostatic Potential on the Inertial Electron Mass (2003). Jorge A. Guala-Valverde, Ricardo A. Achilles and Roberto Blas examine the result critically in Inertial Mass: a Changing Entity? Weber vs. Einstein, Weber Plus Einstein or None? (2005), comparing the Weber-based prediction with the mass–energy equivalence prediction and finding that the two do not agree on the sign of the effect.

Richard R. Pemper and Thomas G Barnes's A New Theory of the Electron (1978, restated 1985) addresses two problems at once. Special relativity, they object, includes the increase of mass at high speed but offers no physical explanation of it — "it is hard to see how arguments about observers can explain what happens when no observers are present" — and they attribute the increase of inertia instead to the magnetic field generated by the motion. They also supply the binding force that classical electrodynamics needs to keep the electron from exploding, and report that the analysis removes the notorious 4/3 discrepancy of classical electron theory. Claus W. Turtur's A Theoretical Determination of the Electron's Mass (2006) pursues the explanation of mass purely by field energy, without a Higgs-type mechanism, taking as its starting point the contradiction Feynman identified in the classical electron. Ray Fleming's Proton and Electron Mass Derived as the Vacuum Energy Displaced by a Casimir Cavity (2012) derives both the electron and proton masses as the vacuum energy excluded by a Casimir cavity, and with them the proton-to-electron mass ratio of about 1836.

Steven Dinowitz's Super-Relativistic Dynamics (1991) proposes a new mass equation in which motion relative to the locally dominant gravitational field, rather than relative to an observer, determines changes in mass, with the consequence that an electron moving at the speed of light relative to the Earth's field would have some 120,000 times its rest mass. Robert J Heaston's Quantum Gravity and the Structure of the Electron (2005) takes up Hawking's and Penrose's suggestion that quantum gravity may occur at the curvature of the electron rather than only at the Planck scale. Ernst L Wall's The Physics of Negative Mass Tachyons and the Fundamental Electrodynamic Origin of Electron de Broglie Waves Plus a Longitudinal Electrodynamic Neutrino Model (1995) builds a unified particle model from negative-mass rather than imaginary-mass tachyons and derives an electrodynamic origin for the electron's de Broglie waves.

Beta decay, the neutrino and Autodynamics

Ricardo L Carezani's A New Experiment With RaE (1988) belongs to this topic because the electron is the particle actually observed in beta decay. The classic discrepancy between the calorimetric measurement of the total decay energy of RaE and the kinetic energy calculated from the beta velocity spectrum by special relativity was what led Pauli to postulate the neutrino; Carezani proposes a new calorimetric experiment designed to discriminate between the special-relativity-plus-neutrino account and Autodynamics. Bergman's helicon analysis of neutron beta-decay reaches the same conclusion from the modelling side, reporting that mass, energy and angular momentum are all accounted for "without necessitating the insertion of a neutrino." Joe Alexander Nahhas's Mu - Muon elementary particle is a bundle of 207 diffracted electrons (1980) presses the polemical version of the objection, treating the muon not as an elementary particle but as diffracted electrons, and the elementary-particle inventory generally as an artefact of experimental interpretation.

Electron clusters and collective behaviour

An experimental strand in the archive concerns highly organised, micron-scale clusters of enormous numbers of electrons — a phenomenon that appears at first sight to violate Coulomb's law.

Ken Shoulders and Steve Shoulders's Charge Clusters in Action (1999) reports new energy transformations from micron-sized clusters of electrons ("EVs") with soliton behaviour and electron populations of the order of Avogadro's number, which on interaction with solid material produce a low-energy phase transformation that liquefies the lattice and propels material to high velocity without the signs of conventional heating. Hal Fox's Stable Electron Clusters: A New Window on the Physical Universe (1997) reviews the field — Shoulders's discovery in low-pressure gases, Rod Neal and Stan Gleeson's production of clusters in aqueous environments, Shang Xian Jin's mathematical model of the toroidal structures — and describes proposed applications in radioactive amelioration, thermal energy production and table-top accelerators. Petr Beckmann offers a theoretical account in Electron Clusters (1990), explaining clusters of some 10¹⁰ electrons within a few microns travelling at about 0.1c along a dielectric boundary by the force of the oscillating Faraday field surrounding a moving electron. M. A. Piestrup, Harold E. Puthoff and P. J. Ebert's Correlated Emission of Electrons (1998) reports charge clustering in field emission and anode spots.

Related work on electrons in condensed and reactive environments includes Robert L Carroll's Superconductivity and Electron Viscosity (1991), which applies quantum theory to fluid mechanics and predicts that bismuth at room temperature is not far from superconductivity; Thomas N Lockyer's account of quantum step resistance in two- and one-dimensional electron gases through electron-to-electron binding energy (2006); Edmund Storms's A New Method for Initiating Nuclear Reactions (1999), proposing a field of study combining the electron environment of chemistry with the nuclear environment; and Leonardo Bosi, Giancarlo Cavalleri and colleagues' derivation of the pure 1/f noise spectrum from the zero-point field acting on free conduction electrons (2008).

Electrons in cosmology

Because the electron is the most abundant charged particle in the universe, several cosmological alternatives on this wiki are built on its properties.

Donald G Carpenter's Electron-Spin-Reversal Noise in the Gigahertz and Terahertz Ranges as a Basis for Tired-Light Cosmology (1990) finds that a standard quantum-mechanical hypothesis anticipates ubiquitous electromagnetic noise in the gigahertz and terahertz ranges, and suggests it may supply both the "thermal background" radiation and the astronomical redshift — the long-sought physical basis of tired light. Lyndon E Ashmore's Recoil Interaction Between Photons and The Electrons In The Plasma Of Intergalactic Space Leading To The Hubble Constant And CMB (2006) starts from the numerical coincidence that the Hubble constant equals h r_e/m_e per cubic metre of space, and proposes that light from distant galaxies is absorbed and re-emitted by intergalactic electrons, the electron recoiling on both occasions, producing a redshift by a double Mössbauer effect. He develops the electron content of the intergalactic medium further in his 2018 paper on galaxies "boiling off" electrons by the photoelectric effect — a mechanism he offers as an alternative to Dark Matter.

Ernest J Sternglass's The Relativistic Electron Pair Theory of Matter and its Implications for Cosmology (1994) makes the relativistic electron pair the fundamental constituent of matter and derives cosmological consequences from it. James Carter's "How the Gradual Change in the Mass of the Electron has Driven the Evolution of the Universe from its Very Beginning" (2009) builds an entire cosmology on a single assumption — that the electron's mass relative to the proton has been decreasing since the beginning — and claims a history of the universe with no initial singularity and no matter–antimatter disparity. Jian-Miin Liu's "An Electronic Radiation of Blackbody: Cosmic Electron Background" (2008) proposes a cosmic electron background at 2.725 K alongside the photon background. Donald E. Scott's "The Electronic Sun" (2012) extends Ralph Juergens's Electric Sun model to the electron population of the solar environment. A H Brady and Stoyan Sarg, discussed above, both identify vacuum electron structures with dark matter.

Electrodynamics and experiment

Several researchers here question the standard force laws governing the electron rather than its structure. Georg Galeczki's What Does the Lorentz Force Have to do with Maxwell's Equations? (1998) argues that the Lorentz force has nothing mathematically or physically to do with Maxwell's field equations, being a phenomenological expression for the motion of a charge in external fields originating in independent, decoupled systems, and that electrodynamics is better built from a force law between moving charges.

The archive also contains straightforward laboratory work. Dave Dameron's An Electronic Attempt to Measure the Time Delay Calculated from the Force -q(v . grad)A (2003) describes an experiment to detect the longitudinal electrodynamic force −q(v·∇)A; the tests of electron-beam transit time gave negative results, which Dameron reports as such. Timothy E Raney's Magnetic Control of Discharge Tube Current (1999) and Magnetic Deflection of Electrons Using Vacuum Tubes (2005) are do-it-yourself experiments on electron trajectories in magnetic fields and on the charge-to-mass ratio. Charles A Yost's Electrostatic Force Flow Visualization (1995) uses schlieren imaging on a Wimshurst generator and reports a coherent thread constantly emanating from charged pointed negative electrodes.

Criticisms from researchers on this wiki

Gathered as objections rather than as models, the criticisms of the standard account of the electron made in this archive are:

A point cannot have structure. David L Bergman argues in Modeling the Real Structure of an Electron and Models of the Electron that charge, mass, spin and magnetic moment cannot all be attributed to an object of zero extent, and that the classical practice of building and testing physical models was abandoned rather than refuted.
The scattering data were misread. Arthur Holly Compton held in his 1919 papers that hard X-ray and gamma-ray scattering already contradicted the point-charge hypothesis; Bergman argues in Observations of the Properties of Physical Entities Part 2 - Shape and Size of Electron, Proton and Neutron that Compton's and Hofstadter's data agree precisely with a thin flexible ring.
"Anomalous" is question-begging. On the ring models of Bergman and Dennis P. Allen the magnetic moment is anomalous only relative to a point-particle baseline; A M Awobode obtains g > 2 from a modified Dirac equation and predicts an orbital g_L < 1.
Duality is an evasion. Petr Beckmann derives the de Broglie relation from Maxwell's equations and lets the electron pass through one slit while its field is diffracted by both; Berthold W Schumacher has the electron's Coulomb field probe the apparatus ahead of it; Werner A Hofer treats the uncertainty relations as an artefact of a formal rather than realistic treatment of internal structure.
Orbital collapse was never a genuine problem. Jan Olof Jonson and Adam R Brute give classical reasons why a bound electron need not radiate; Philipp M Kanarev denies the orbit itself and substitutes precession.
The wave function is not a physical wave. Bergman's Electron Wave Function: Electromagnetic Waves Emitted by Ring Electrons argues that the Schrödinger equation cannot be a complete description of a microphysical system and neglects intrinsic characteristics of particle motion.
Mass is not a primitive. V F Mikhailov reports experimentally that the electron's inertial mass changes in a field-free electrostatic potential; Pemper and Thomas G Barnes make relativistic mass increase a magnetic effect; Claus W. Turtur and Ray Fleming derive the mass from field or vacuum energy.
The elementary-particle inventory is unearned. Rati Ram Sharma argues that no Standard Model "elementary" particle satisfies the definition of an element; Joe Alexander Nahhas treats the muon as a bundle of diffracted electrons; Ricardo L Carezani challenges the beta-decay reasoning that produced the neutrino.
Electrodynamics itself is misassembled. Georg Galeczki separates the Lorentz force from Maxwell's equations; Christian Sutterlin and John R Warfield deny that the magnetic field around moving electrons arises the way the textbooks say it does.
Charge is a flow, not a property. David Tombe makes charge the rate of aether flow into a sink or out of a source, and Roland H Dishington makes the electron a depletion in the medium — positions on which the electron is not a thing in space at all.

Researchers on this wiki

David L Bergman — Spinning Charged Ring and Helicon models; the case against the point particle
David Tombe — electrons as aether sinks; the rotating electron–positron dipole; the double helix magnetic field
Francis Viren Fernandes — the electron as a torus of 186-ether; critique of the electron-volt as a unit of energy
Philipp M Kanarev — ring and hollow-torus models from spectroscopy; denial of the orbital electron
Milo M Wolff — the Wave Structure of Matter; the electron as a Space Resonance; spin as spherical rotation
Martin Rivas — kinematical model of the spinning electron; charge at a point moving at c about the centre of mass
Robert L Carroll — the toroidal electron from half-integer separation constants
Roland H Dishington — the electron as a zone of depletion in the aether
Jaroslav G Klyushin — electron dynamics in ether; the torus with equatorial and meridional rotations
Stoyan Sarg — Basic Structures of Matter model of the electron
Thomas N Lockyer — vector particle physics; the precise electron and positron
Rati Ram Sharma — the electron composed of cosminos in Unified Theory
A M Awobode — modified Dirac equation; gyromagnetic ratios
Petr Beckmann — the double-slit paradox resolved; electron clusters
Berthold W Schumacher — the Coulomb field as the diffracting agent
Werner A Hofer — realistic internal structure of electrons and photons
William M Honig — dual fluid plenum derivation of h and the electron self-energy
V F Mikhailov — experiments on electron mass in a field-free electrostatic potential
Arthur Holly Compton — the founding size-and-shape papers of 1919
Jan Olof Jonson — classical stability of electron orbits
Horace R Drew — periodic helical structural model
Daniel H Deutsch — electromechanical dipole models of the elementary particles
Glen C Collins — Helicon theory of atomic and sub-atomic structure
John R Warfield — the non-dipole electron and permanent magnetism
Koshun Suto — potential energy as a decrease in electron rest mass energy
Robert J Heaston — quantum gravity at the curvature of the electron
Ernst L Wall — tachyon-based particle model and the origin of de Broglie waves
Ricardo L Carezani — the RaE experiment and the neutrino hypothesis
Ernest J Sternglass — relativistic electron pair theory of matter
Donald G Carpenter — electron-spin-reversal noise as a basis for tired light
Lyndon E Ashmore — photon–electron recoil redshift; electrons in the intergalactic medium
A H Brady — the vacuum as an electron–positron lattice
Hal Fox and Edmund Storms — electron charge clusters and their applications
Georg Galeczki — the Lorentz force and Maxwell's equations
Vesselin C Noninski — the singlet state and non-locality
Steven Dinowitz — mass relative to the dominant gravitational field
Timothy E Raney, Dave Dameron and Charles A Yost — laboratory experiments on electrons and electrostatic flow
Adam R Brute — the equilibrium orbital electron
Tolga Yarman — quantum numbers of electronic states in diatomic molecules