Electron as Spatiotemporal Complexity due to Self-Organized Criticality

Abstract

The electron, which has been pictured as an elementary particle ever since J.J. Thomson's e/m-measurement in 1897, and the relativistic motion of which is described by the Dirac equation, is discussed in the light of the recent progress made in Science of Complex Systems. Theoretical arguments and experimental evidences are presented which show that such an electron exhibits characteristic properties of spatiotemporal complexities due to Self-Organized Criticality (SOC). This implies in particular that, conceptually and logically, it is neither possible nor meaningful to identify such an object with an ordinary particle, which by definition is something that has a fixed mass (size), a fixed lifetime, and a fixed structure.