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Originally Posted by davidgow77 Put in very simple terms, if there is no space between the particles, then they must, philosophically at least, be regarded as one particle. |
Let's start with the basic building blocks of matter: the quarks and leptons. Experimentally, these are point particles with no extensions hence they are zero-dimensional. Yet they have energy, mass, electric charge, magnetic dipole moment, electric dipole moment, spin, helicity, etc which made up their measurable properties and detectable by experiments.
Now, let's take the electron (positron) as our test particle. Can we isolate one electron for our study? Yes. This was done by Hans G. Dehmelt and he received the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics. Still his experiment cannot determine whether the electron has extension. It is still a point particle. All its measurable properties can be precisely detected except its physical dimension. But both the electric moment and magnetic moment require a small distance separation between the charges or magnetic poles (no monopole yet found by experiment). So, the separation is agreed among theorists to be zero (or the existence of null vectors, these are called vector bosons in gauge symmetry, force carriers). But for concept of mass, the separation can still be zero for the vector boson called graviton (zero mass) and the scalar boson called the Higgs (massive particle). Both of these still cannot be detected by experiments. But they must exist in equations of theories for the sake of consistency.