It's All About Relationships

(image from http://www.getentrepreneurial.com)

What is the size of a single electron? How about a photon of light?

Try to look them up and you will quickly become frustrated. Sure, you can find the size of orbitals that electrons travel in or the wavelength of a certain frequency of light - but these are not the size of the particles themselves. The electron itself is somewhere within the orbital and the wavelength of light is an emergent property of many photons travelling through space...

Now try finding the size of a neutron or proton. Easy - you find definite numbers right away!

The difference between the two cases is this: Electrons and Photons are fundamental particles: meaning they can not be broken down into smaller pieces. You can destroy them or create them but you can not break them down into smaller pieces. Atoms, protons, and neutrons are aggregate particles and can be further broken down (atoms into electrons,protons, & neutrons; protons and neutrons into quarks and gluons).

Fundamental particles have no size in and of themselves (they are dimensionless). It is only in their relation to one another that a definite size is created. Each individual quark may have no defined size by them self, but put three of them together to make a proton and you will have constructed an object that DOES have definite size.

(image from Jefferson Lab)

So the stuff we deal with in our daily lives (light & matter) is all made out of smaller things (photons, electrons, quarks & gluons) without shape or size. It is only by their interaction with each other than anything definite is formed. Out of nothing comes something.

"The world is a network of relations not an assembly of things" - Carlo Rovelli