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4 answers

well, yes and no.
in the article referenced below, concerning the first electron-positron collider the following is reported: --

"On February 27, 1961, just less than a year after Touschek’s seminar, we got the first stored electron and positrons.The phototube registered pulses, and to our surprise even a single electron was visible to the naked eye through one of the portholes. A common joke was to store a few electrons and astonish distinguished visitors, among whom were Edoardo Amaldi, Philip Ivor Dee from Glasgow (a former student of Ernest Rutherford and a good friend of Bruno),Wolfgang Paul from Bonn, Guy von Dardel from Lund,Boyce McDaniel and Albert Silverman from Cornell,and Matthew Sands and Robert Walker from Caltech.There was enough light to take a Polaroid photograph of a single electron: Although its intensity per orbit was quite small,it passed the porthole 75 million times per second! We estimated that the small blue-white spot we saw was nearly equivalent to the light from a star like the Sun five light-years away from us."

2007-02-16 23:24:44 · answer #1 · answered by waif 4 · 0 0

No, for several reasons. First, it's way, way, WAY too small. A human hair is about one hundred microns, give or take. The wavelengths of light visible to humans range from about 400-700 nanometers, which is almost one thousand times smaller. An electron is estimated to be something like 10^-15 meters long, which is about a hundred million times smaller than that. You couldn't focus a beam of light sharply enough to see it.

Secondly, if you could focus a beam of anything small enough to visualize an electron, you're talking about energy levels equivalent to gamma or cosmic rays, so even if you could focus a beam of light on it (which is itself an implausibility because that would imply you knew exactly where the electron was and runs afoul of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle) you couldn't see that beam with the naked eye.

2007-02-17 06:54:00 · answer #2 · answered by Ralph S 3 · 1 0

The two answers above are good answers.
Although you cannot see the electron which is both a wave and a particle, you can see the effects of electrons moving - in everyday life like the TV, fluorescent tubes, electricity and many more.

2007-02-17 07:21:28 · answer #3 · answered by pete 2 · 0 0

No.
If you could then you would see its location and its velocity, contrary to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

2007-02-17 06:42:44 · answer #4 · answered by J C 5 · 0 0

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