<<No matter, by definition, is "uncrushable." Or indestructible, for that matter.>>

An electron is uncrushable.? Can an electron decay?

-----Original Message----- From: stevertigo stvrtg@gmail.com To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Thu, Jul 23, 2009 10:53 am Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia:Paradoxes

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 5:40 AM, Daniel R. Tobiasdan@tobias.name wrote:

There is also the possibility that *neither* of these things [God & uncrushable stones] exist, and that is the possibility that seems most logical to me.

The God paradoxes don't involve so much the issue of God's existence, but the absurdity of ideas about what He is and can or cannot do. Words like "omnipotence," and "omnipresence" get thrown about a lot, without much real regard toward defining their meaning in the relevant context. And in any case, the points raised are simply paradox-like absurdities - easy to conjure up, and sort of interesting-sounding - but not actual paradoxes.

The 'solutions' are pretty straightforward: Nothing is "omnipotent" - God is simply far more powerful than most people can imagine or understand - not "all powerful," but still much more so than you - thus the word "omni" suffices, even if its not accurate. "Omnipresence" is likewise only accurate if one limits the definition to mean 'presence within things that require presence' - Living, conscious beings, for example - there's no need to be intimately aware of atomic reactions in supernovae or whatever.

And of course, any "stone" is just a material conglomerate - "crushing" itself refers to a concept of separating atoms through force of weight. No matter, by definition, is "uncrushable." Or indestructible, for that matter.

-Steven

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On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 3:07 PM, wjhonson@aol.com wrote:

An electron is uncrushable.? Can an electron decay?

An electron is not matter. Its a subatomic particle and constituent of matter. It cannot be crushed, because its not in the scale of objects to which crushing (weight force / relative mass) apply. It can of course be annihilated, or "decay," which satisfies my rebuttal of the indestructibility concept.

-Steven

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 5:29 PM, wjhonson@aol.com wrote:

"An electron is not matter." Interesting idea.  Do you have an authority for that statement ? Sounds a little odd to me.

Well not all things are "matter." Light, for example. But there's a bit of a semantic ambiguity issue with the word "matter," so like with other words, its meaning is not quite precise. But anyway its meaning tends to be synonymous with atoms or else things that have mass.

Yes, electrons are known to have a certain rest mass, and so in a certain way electrons can be thought of as being "matter." But this rest mass measurement is only local in the atomic context - so it's incorrect to assume that its mass is actually intrinsic to the particle itself.

Steve