A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Wish granted: the same electron is added to all atoms in the universe.
This one single electron is created in a quantum state described by a wave function that is uniformly distributed over every atom in the universe. This wave function collapses nearly instantaneously to a single position, and the end result is that one random atom in the entire universe gains one electron.
Nothing of interest happens.
Considering how intentionally malecious the side effects of typical genie-wishes tend to be, the extra electron probably comes to rest in the wishers hypophysis and causes a free radical that leads to a rare sort of cancer that prevents the wisher from falling asleep ever again, so he dies in madness scratching out his own eyes.
0r something similar along that line.
0r something similar along that line.
I'm really bothered by that zero 0 instead of an o O.
Oh, you are right...
Sorry, handwriting recognition sometimes has its own mind.
And this error must have slipt my prove reading as it is just too well camouflaged...
Using a drawing pad for typing, and spelling the word “slipt” !?! could a prophet truly be among us???
Can the wish include a --dry-run option before going for it fully?
That's the Chris and Jack sketch currently listed above somewhere in this thread on my client.
It's all fun and games until someone points out that anti-atoms are predicted to have identical properties to atoms.
Then the whole chiral parity symmetry stuff gets involved, and you talk about quantized spacetime, and how come the entire universe is essentially perturbations on a continous universe spanning set of fields, and things start getting existential.
I personally believe time is the real problem.
go with the one electron theory, how can you add an elecron to every atom when there's already only one electron in the whole universe.
Well now there are two electrons in the universe and their job is way easier.
So that's how matter won over antimatter.
Classic case of "history is written by the victors". You only call it antimatter because it lost, if it won, you'd call it matter.
The genie granted two wishes at once. The other was from a speed runner.
During the race, an ionizing particle from outer space collided with DOTA_Teabag's N64, flipping the eighth bit of Mario's first height byte. Specifically, it flipped the byte from 11000101 to 11000100, from "C5" to "C4". This resulted in a height change from C5837800 to C4837800, which by complete chance, happened to be the exact amount needed to warp Mario up to the higher floor at that exact moment.
The real question isn't if the universe ends...
It's if the genie magic expands outward from the source at the speed of light, or if it's instantaneous everywhere, which would allow information to be transmitted faster than the speed of light, allowing for violations of causality, and destroying our fundamental understanding of the universe before we all died.
This assumes the genie doesn't have access to some weird higher-reality or higher-"dimensional" power. For instance, if the universe is a simulation, then perhaps the genie has access to a console.
And you don't call discovering that the universe is a simulation "destroying our fundamental understanding of the universe"?
Yes and no. Nothing that we know about the universe preclude it being a simulation, so learning only that it is a simulation is more expanding out fundamental understanding of the universe. However, as things stand, we are pretty damn convinced that nothing violates causality while following the internal rules of the universe, so if the genie did that without invoking some power we might call "outside the universe", then we learn that the universe can internally violate causality - THAT might destroy our fundamental understanding of the universe.
real question, is there a difference?
In theory yes, but for any observer, it won't matter and it's all the same to them, as they cannot observe any difference in either case.
This reminds me of the sketch from Chris and Jack, where one person tries to outsmart a genie with the perfect wish and almost succeeds, but ultimately fails.
Chris n Jack are hilarious!
Fun fact : Jack is Jack de sena - Voice actor of sokka from Avatar the Last Airbender.
They have cameos from other voice actors from the show as well in their skits.
I asked ChatGPT what would happen. Here you go:
If every atom in the universe suddenly gained one extra electron, the result would be instant, universe-ending chaos — in less than a nanosecond. Here’s why:
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Right now, matter is electrically neutral — the positive charges in nuclei balance the negative charges of electrons. Adding one electron to every atom makes every single atom negatively charged. The universe instantly becomes dominated by repulsive electrostatic forces.
Coulomb’s law tells us electric forces are ~10³⁶ times stronger than gravity. That means: • Atoms would violently repel each other. • Molecules couldn’t hold together. • Planets, stars, and galaxies — all held together by gravity — would be ripped apart by overwhelming electrostatic repulsion.
Within moments, all normal matter disintegrates into a plasma of electrons and nuclei being hurled away from each other.
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Each atom now has one more electron than its nucleus can bind: • The extra electron would either occupy a weakly bound outer orbital or be completely unbound. • Chemical bonds depend on balanced electron sharing — those would fail instantly. • Solids, liquids, and gases all cease to exist in recognizable form.
Essentially, chemistry ends. There’s no more “matter” in the familiar sense — just a roiling cloud of charged particles.
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The addition of an electron to every atom requires — or releases — colossal energy, depending on the element and context: • Ionization energies and electron affinities differ between atoms. • You’re effectively forcing a global-scale electron capture reaction.
But the real kicker is that the sudden Coulomb repulsion between everything would dwarf any nuclear explosion imaginable. The entire universe’s matter would “explode” outward — far beyond the speed of galactic escape velocities — powered by the electrostatic potential energy now released.
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With matter annihilated into a universal electron-ion plasma: • Photons would scatter off free charges (via Thomson scattering). • The universe would become completely opaque. • Eventually, as it expands and cools, you might end up with diffuse clouds of charged particles, but never stable atoms again.
You’d basically reset the universe to something like an ultra-energetic pre-recombination plasma — except with the wrong charge balance and no chance of re-neutralizing.
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In short:
Adding one extra electron to every atom would: • Destroy all atomic and molecular structure. • Overwhelm gravity entirely. • Convert the universe into a high-energy, negatively charged plasma. • Likely erase all physical structures — stars, planets, life, everything — in an instant.
It’s not a slow catastrophe; it’s an immediate, total one.
Maybe that's what happened with the big bang. Some ent just randomly wished the protons and neutrons liked each other and electrons have to just dance around them instead of the stable atomic pudding as observed and proven by J.J Thomson which made sure the world was flat and unchanging, moving only on the whims of the Great A'tuin.
We now have this mess where things are spinning and rolling around. Absolute nonsense I tell you. It's all chaotic and unbalanced. I wouldn't be surprised if suddenly everything popped or ripped apart.
Turns out, there's a rule against exterminating all life in the universe with a wish, but the genie doesn't know what an electron is or what adding one to every atom will do, so you've found yourself a loophole.
Genie, while looking up Wikipedia:
Aah, I understand. Nice wish, granted!
I'm a physicist, not a genie, and I have no fucking clue what adding an electron to every atom would do. I can't even begin to fathom the question.
I don't know either, I just think the consequences would be universally negative.
Whatever it is that happens, it would be pretty violent.
"What If" had a slightly different, more localized but more concentrated premise it covered once:
Electron Moon
Quote:
"This is, by far, the most destructive What-If scenario to date."
1.) I wish the speed of light were 60 MPH.
2.) I wish nothing could travel slower than light.
3.) I wish for the genie's freedom.
Did someone read The Laundry Files? What you are describing is approximately used in making a Basilisk Gun
just choose an electron somewhere random in the universe, and declare said electron to be the legal property of every atom in the universe. problem solved
Sounds like a case for xkcd's what if
What will 1 extra electron do? Destroy universe?
Is it like every Proton has an anti-proton and if it wasnt perfectly balanced the universe would fall apart? Ive heard something like that before...
or would mess with the chemical bonds of all chemistry, likely breaking up every single molecule into individual atoms, immediately killing everyone and destroy everything
Lots of things become conductive.
It'll be like a Coulombic explosion, but with an excess of negative instead of positive charges.
Everywhere in the universe where matter forms lumps, they would disintegrate.
my wish is to change the mass of the proton.
To 23 lbs
*23 N
Is there an XKCD What If about this? Sounds exactly like that territory.
ls this some kind of problem at all?
I mean, it is not wishing to add an electron to each atom in the Universe...
False vacuum ... expansion?
