The Electric Field Of An Electron Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Davies & Gribbin (1992: 236, 237):

Because of quantum uncertainty, we can envisage a particle such as an electron as surrounded by a cloud of virtual photons which buzz around it like bees round a hive. Each photon emitted by the electron is rapidly reabsorbed. Photons nearer the electron are allowed to be progressively more energetic because they do not venture far from home, and so need exist only for the briefest duration. Picture, then, the electron immersed in a shimmering bath of evanescent quantum energy, intense near the electron but dwindling steadily with distance. This restless, seething ferment of virtual photons is, in fact, precisely the electron's electric field, described in quantum language. 

If another electron enters the melee, it can absorb one of the first electron's attendant photons, with the exchange producing a force in the way we have already described [for electron scattering]. But if no second electron (or other charged particle) is present, the temporary photons have nowhere to go but back to the original electron. In this way, each electron acts on itself through its own photon cloud (Figure 39).

 

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the electric field of an electron is the region of the instantiation of its electric charge potential. It is not quite the case that the virtual photons are emitted and reabsorbed by the actual electron, but that the virtual photons are momentary instantiations of this potential, with the duration of their instantiations inversely proportional to energy they instantiate.