What if there’s only one electron in the entire universe? It sounds crazy, but when you follow that rabbit hole it reveals something even bigger.
Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord!
Check out the Space Time Merch Store
Sign up for the mailing list to get episode notifications and hear special announcements!
Search the Entire Space Time Library Here:
Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Matt O’Dowd
Post Production by Leonardo Scholzer
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Associate Producer: Bahar Gholipour
Executive Producer: Andrew Kornhaber
Executive in Charge for PBS: Maribel Lopez
Director of Programming for PBS: Gabrielle Ewing
Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: Mike Martin
Spacetime is a production of Kornhaber Brown for PBS Digital Studios.
This program is produced by Kornhaber Brown, which is solely responsible for its content.
© 2026 PBS. All rights reserved.
End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg:
Space Time Was Made Possible In Part By:
Big Bang
Alexander Tamas
Filip Rolenec
Juan Benet
Kenneth See
Mark Rosenthal
MATTHEW OCKO
Morgan Hough
Peter Barrett
Vinnie Falco
Supernova
Ethan Cohen
Grace Biaelcki
Justin Lloyd
Mark Heising
Rad Antonov
Stephen Wilcox
Tristan Lucian Claudius Aurelius Tyacke
Hypernova
Alex Kern
Ben Delo
chuck zegar
Dean Galvin
Donal Botkin
D. Rollere
Gregory Forfa
Jeff White
John R. Slavik
Paul C. Pedersen
Pala Massimiliano
Patrick O’hara
Scott Gorlick
Scott Gray
Spencer Jones
Vlad Shipulin
Zachary Haberman
Антон Кочков
Gamma Ray Burst
Alex Gan
Aaron Pinto
Almog Cohen
Arko Provo Mukherjee
Austin Richards
Ayden Miller
Bert Whetstone
Brandon Lattin
Brandon R
Cal Harrington
Cal Stephens
Chris Liao
Collin Dutrow
Craig Falls
Craig Stonaha
Dan Warren
Daniel Donahue
Daniel Jennings
Darrell Stewart
David Giltinan
David Johnston
Diana S Polijar
Donovan King
Doug Richardson
Doyle Vann
Eric Kiebler
Eric Raschke
Eric Schrenker
Faraz Khan
Frederic Simon
Harsh Khandhadia
Isaac Suttell
James Trimmier
Jason Holtkamp
Jeb Campbell
Jeff Harris
Jerry Thomas
Jim Bartosh
John Anderson
John De Witt
John Hanavan
John Mieras USN Ret
Joseph Salomone
Junaid Ali
Justin Zheng
Kacper Cieśla
Kent Durham
Koen Wilde
Kyle Atkinson
Lori Ferris
Marcelo Garcia
Mark Daniel Cohen
Mark Delagasse
Mathew Ray
Matt Kaprocki
Matthew Johnson
Matthew Twyman
Michael Barton
Michael Clark
Michael Lev
Michael Purcell
Michael Spallino
Mikk Mihkel Nurges
Nicolas Katsantonis
Nils Anderson
Paul Wood
Reuben Brewer
Robert DeChellis
Ross Kennedy
Ross Story
Russell Moore
SamSword
Sandhya Devi
Sean Owen
Shane Calimlim
Terje Vold
Terrance Cennon
Thomas Dougherty
Tybie Fitzhugh
WILLIAM HAY III
Zac Sweers
source

It is a cool idea. It rides on matter being capable of traveling backwards in time though, and that is pretty dubious to me.
Reminds me of the old Greek myth of the Grey Sisters, who all had to share one eye and one tooth between them.
it's like the antithesis of the multiple horse theory
communism is when everyone takes 1-zeptosecond turns with the electron
It could be due to quantum superposition
There is more than 1 electron in the universe. There are 3. And the one who collects all 3 electrons will be named king.
Mathematics often makes us lose touch with reality.
"Going faster than light is not possible, If it was you could see the photons bouncing off of yourself, and that would be time travel and cause a paradox for some arbitrary reason!"
"There is only one electron and it just bounces back and forth in time in addition to the spatial dimensions for no reason that I can fathom, but I made the numbers math it out":
Nobel prize and standing ovation
Soooo, how about you explain yourselves?
Here's what im thinking, a "string", fold it, do it again and again, thats everything.
I hope Wheeler got given his flowers for the initial thought. He was lucky to have a student smart enough to run with his apparently bonkers idea, but many a bonkers idea has forwarded human knowledge and invention, so his thought is equally as important (if not more so than Feinman's continuation, because without it, RF wouldn't have come up with QED. At least not then.)
There only one electon and it's always working overtime.
What if its not ONE electron, what if electrons doesnt really exist as an individual thing and there is a field all over the space.
Imagine we are in a soup. We can identify particles of carrot, onion, etc… and using the same method we found a particle we call electron. But that electron is not really a "solid" thing, its just part of the liquid of the soup, but at our scale we cant feel we are inside a soup, we only can measure the tiny particles that form the liquid.
No. (kadang! 1,3 million views)
This echoes the "One" universe of Parmenides and Zeno. And in Pyrite Cosmology this tracks. Though in that theory it's more about all electrons are part of the same 5D lattice.
one big vibration to rule them all
-You get ONE. Don't waste it….
These are the conversations I have with myself in my head
'Stoner worthy epiphany'
😂
I've never had a term for this
Some of these are genuinely the best/funnest tho
Take it bk to the Aether.
Everything is exchanged in perpetual balance just beyond the Planck limit -10-³⁵
A Wave is an action upon a medium, the ripple of a tsunami in Japan that reaches the USA is the same event but obviously the wave is not the same bit of water, light is an reaction to an action like a perturbation in the Aether and not a thing that waves independently as it traveses a-b-∞
I've actually discovered it is both one electron and many at the same time
The electron of significance depends on who, when & why.
Quantum field theory ultimately talks about the same thing in a more intuitive way: all electrons are excitations of the same single field, like waves on an ocean. And surprise, very likely all of reality is the same thing once all quantum fields are unified into one… Maximum simplicity
This short is somewhat wrong. The theory of one universal electron was proposed but it didn't last long as it had some fundamental problems. The biggest being that this theoretical model didn't explain why there is such a huge imbalance between the quantity of electrons vs positrons in the universe. Besides, modern quantum physics models explain the reason why all electrons (and positrons) have the same properties. It's because rather than electons being considered as particles, they are considered the same ripple-like phenomenon in a universal cosmic field. So because they are the same effect from one thing, all electrons have the same exact properties. Now it is correct that the one universal electron theory led to QED but that's more accidentally and indirectly. One electron theory isn't part of QED but had a ripple effect in creating it. Yes that was a joke playing on what I said previously.
This is going to give my boss some really bad ideas….
What happens at the Cern hadron collider when they smash electrons into each other at near speed of light and pulverize them, bits of the universe should dissappear every time if not all.
One electron. Even the Universe has Shrinkflation.
knock into something, what? it runs so fast it knocks into itself? so nothing runs faster than light is?
Well, only if an electron can be entangled with itself. imho you need to to en-tango, but that’s just me.
So where are all the positrons? We should (seemingly) see the same number as electrons, shoudn't we?
I’m an engineer and this doesn’t even sound feasible. In a water molecule there would be 10 electrons. One molecule has a volume of .011nm^3. So across 1mm is ~3.6 MILLION water molecules. To fill the ocean alone it would be 1.2×10^48. This does NOT include anything else. The rock, the air, the molecules in space, the SUN. Not including every other planet plus the trillions of galaxies and their planets. The scale of the universe alone would disprove this theory. There is simply not enough time for it to simply bounce and be everywhere at once…… even if you’re traveling back and forth through time….
I've always knew that if something moved at infinite speed or had infinite time it would eventually fill all space, never thought this could ever be applied to reality in a way
dibs
Turns out that theory is 100% true.
What they haven't yet discovered is that this one lonely electron is also gay.
working my career practicing Ohm's Law, I would argue, NO!
Infinity is absurd.
No
There are no bad questions, there are only bad answers, or good ideas.
In modern physics, particles like electrons are not tiny, solid billiard balls. Instead, the universe is permeated by fields and what looks like particles is actually ripples in those fields. When energy vibrates or ripples in the electron field, we observe that localized ripple as an electron.
Isn’t there a theory in quantum mechanics that every atom is everywhere at the same time, with “mass” essentially being a more dense collection (picture a bell curve) of atoms?