A joke I heard in college: "An engineer is a person who assumes that a horse is a sphere in order to make the math easier." Well, I'm afraid not just engineers practice this vice. Think about anything from your experience: A lamppost, a baseball, a table - they all have a shape. Anything we can experience that is made of matter has some extent in space. So why does anyone think the electron is a point of zero dimension?
In the paper Against Point Charges, I argue that the electron cannot be a point particle. I don't mean that it is a probability wave either. The "chance of finding the electron in a volume element" of the
wave function leads to the question, chance of finding what? The volume elements are infinitesimal, and I accuse that the electron of the wavefunction is still a point electron, one which, since by assumption it does not take up space inherently, conveniently expands by the probability cloud so it can do things like form molecular orbitals while still being a point of no physical extent. Nice trick.
I'll run down the argument in case two pages is too long:
A point charge is a point mass.
A point mass is a black hole.
A black hole does not radiate.
An electron radiates.
Therefore an electron is not a point charge.
A physicist on Reddit disputed that real scientists believe any of the premises of my argument, sometimes more persuasively than others. What do you think? I will assume that an empty comment box means everyone agrees with me - but just to make the math easier!
Whether you just heard about GUTCP and Brilliant Light Power (BrLP) today or have been following for years, you should check out Brett Holverstott's blog. He worked at BrLP when it was still called BlackLight Power, and has a lot to say about it. Check out his book too.
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