2 upvotes, 3 direct replies (showing 3)
View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Biology, Chemistry, Neuroscience, Medicine, Psychology
Is it our current understanding that all electrons, neutrons and protons are all made up exactly the same? it's just the number of "trons" that makes up the different elements?
Comment by OpenPlex at 12/03/2025 at 20:58 UTC*
4 upvotes, 1 direct replies
To my understanding, all protons are identical, all electrons are identical, all neutrons are identical... every type of unchanging aspect of their behavior and what they're made of is identical: their rest energy, their charge, their weight, etc.
The number of protons is what makes an element, the atom's main identity.
Neutrons act like filler between protons which are positively charged (edit: the types of quarks in neutrons add up to a neutral charge, also each of the neutrons offers its own strong force bonding). And the amounts of neutrons affect the atom's stability and sometimes also certain aspects, particularly in hydrogen with one neutron (heavy hydrogen) vs with two neutrons (tritium) in their differing uses for nuclear fusion, for example.
Electrons with their negative charges will balance the positive charges of an equal amount of protons in an atom, but not always perfectly for every type of atom, and so from that imperfection the electrons are able to bond together atoms to form into molecules. The reasons go deeper into chemistry and if you want to explore into that further, you could start by looking up an explainer on covalent bonds and ionic bonds.
Comment by mfb- at 13/03/2025 at 09:55 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Yes, and we can even test that they are *exactly* the same.
All these particles are fermions and two identical fermions cannot be in the same state (Pauli exclusion principle). But that rule only applies if they are exactly identical. If different electrons were a bit different, then they could all be in the ground state and there wouldn't be any chemistry. Similarly, if protons or neutrons would be slightly different then we would get completely different nuclei.
Comment by Blu3moss at 13/03/2025 at 07:23 UTC
0 upvotes, 0 direct replies
There is an idea that the reason why even the subatomic particles (electrons in particular in the link below) are exactly the same is because they are the same particle along different "world lines". One way I imagine this is, imagine an electron **now** and **a few seconds later** - we can easily imagine it is the same one. Now replace **now** with ***here***, and **a few seconds** later with ***there***... (Entirely speculatively, this indicates superdeterminism[1] for me).
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism