

Electron Is Surprisingly Spherical, Say Scientists Following 10-Year Study - pwg
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110525131707.htm

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hugh3
This writeup confuses me.

Firstly, it's very nice that we have put an upper limit on the nonsphericality
of the electron. But was there ever any reason to suspect it of being anything
other than perfectly spherical? Not last I heard, so is this really a
"surprise"? (Not to pooh-pooh the experiment, it would certainly be an
interesting surprise if it _were_ nonspherical...)

 _the electron differs from being perfectly round by less than
0.000000000000000000000000001 cm. This means that if the electron were
magnified to the size of the solar system, it would still appear spherical to
within the width of a human hair._

OK, thanks to the fact that journalists assume we can't read scientific
notation (wasn't this covered in primary school?) I had to count up all those
zeroes. And I think there's 26 of 'em, so we're talking 1e-28 m. But last I
heard the electron doesn't _have_ a radius, so what's this radius we're
blowing up to the size of the solar system? If it's the "classical" Compton
radius then that's about 3e-15m, so blow that up to the size of the solar
system and our 1e-28m variation is about 0.5 m, not the human-hair-thickness
implied in the article. We're off by about five orders of magnitude.

