the.com/electron
an unbreakable speck that builds every chair, star, and bad decision you've ever made
means A tiny, negatively charged subatomic particle that orbits the nucleus of an atom and carries the electric current behind everything from lightning to your phone.
from From the Greek 'elektron,' meaning amber — the fossilized tree resin that, when rubbed, crackles and pulls bits of straw toward it. The ancients noticed this static cling without understanding it. In 1891 the Irish physicist George Johnstone Stoney revived the old amber word to name the fundamental unit of electric charge, so the name of a particle no one had yet seen looped back to a glowing yellow stone the Greeks knew thousands of years before.
- true size
- No measurable radius; it's effectively a point
- old discovery
- Found in 1897 by J.J. Thomson
- two places
- Can exist in many spots until measured
- antimatter twin
- Its opposite, the positron, annihilates it instantly
- electric life
- Their flow is literally every current you use