The One-Electron Universe | Space Time

Could it be that all the electrons in the universe are simply one, single electron moving back and forth through time? Get your own Space Time t­shirt at Tweet at us! @pbsspacetime Email us! pbsspacetime [at] gmail [dot] com Comment on Reddit: Previous Episode: Dark Flow In the spring of 1940, the great physicist John Archibald Wheeler had a flash of insight. He picked up the phone and called Richard Feynman. The fateful conversation began, “Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass." "Why?" asked Wheeler’s former graduate student. "Because, they are all the same electron!" Wheeler went on to describe the One-Electron Universe idea: that there exists only one electron, and that electron traverses time in both directions. It bounces in time, eventually traversing the entire past and future history of the universe in both directions, and interacting with itself countless times on each pass. In this way it fills the universe with the appearance of countless electrons. And when the electron is moving backwards in time it is a positron; the antimatter counterpart of the electron. Written and Hosted by Matt O’Dowd Produced by Rusty Ward Graphics by Kurt Ross Assistant Editing and Sound Design by Mike Petrow Made by Kornhaber Brown (www.kornhaberbrown.com) Comments answer by Matt: 0xFFF1 Daniel Grass M Paulson Big Bang CoolAsCats David Nicklas Quasar Tambe Barsbay Max Levine Mayank M. Mehrota Mars Yentur Mark Rosenthal Dean Fuqua Hypernova Eugene Lawson Chuck Zegar Jordan Young Ratfeast John Hofmann Joseph Salomone Martha Hunt Craig Peterson Science Via Markets Barry Hatfield Peter Durocher Michael Kers Chris Hicks Mark Vasile Patrick Murray Sultan Alkhulaifi Alex Seto Jared Moore Michal-Peanut Karmi Bernardo Higuera Erik Stein Daniel Lyons Kevin Warne JJ Bagnell J Rejc Amy Jie Avi Goldfinger John Pettit Shannan Catalano Florian Stinglmayr Yubo Du Benoit Pagé-Guitard Nathan Leniz Jessica Fraley Loro Lukic Brandon Labonte David Crane Greg Weiss