Editing 2734: Electron Color

In this comic [[Miss Lenhart]] is teaching a school class physics. One of her students ask what the color of electrons is.

This is a relevant question for a kid to ask since on many scientific diagrams of atoms, the subatomic particles have been assigned colors to identify them for the reader. Neutrons are generally red, green, or gray; protons red or green and electrons might be blue or yellow. But there is no general rule so the kid may be confused. Additionally, some scientific diagrams use color coding rather than actually representative colors, and the kid may be wondering what color quarks actually are.

In completely off character style, Miss Lenhart actually gives a correct explanation and states that, unlike the diagrams, which are colored for convenience, the particles are not colored. She even gives the correct explanation for this fact: ''They're too small to interact with visible light, so "color" isn't even defined for them.'' For a more typical Miss Lenhart see for instance [[1519: Venus]].

Of course she then continues by saying that electrons are definitely yellow. If she means they should be yellow on diagrams, because she feels that is to correct way to depict them in drawings of atoms, or if she just teases her young pupils is uncertain. But her off-panel pupils takes her word for it. Presumable the kid who asked question says he knew it, to the fact that electrons are yellow (the first color he mentions in his original question.) He and the other pupils completely ignores what Miss Lenhart just told them. The debate then starts as one pupil claims ''and protons are red?'', and another chimes in, with a ''No, they're gray!'' This only makes sense in a debate of how to draw atoms. Not regarding their actual color, as Miss Lenhart just explained.

The opinions over the colors are probably based on what kind of diagram a persons has initially been exposed, and those 'standard' diagramatic conventions and now forevermore culturally predisposed to different 'correct' interpretations of which hues to use.  

Although individual electrons do not have a color, it's possible to produce a solution of [https://chemed.chem.purdue.edu/demos/main_pages/9.4.html 'solvated' electrons], which lend a blue tint to the solvent.

The title text refers to the {{w|color charge}} property of quarks, a property which is part of {{w|quantum chromodynamics}}. As mentioned by [[Randall]], these have nothing to do with color as we know it, but is just a way to represent interactions between quarks in a sufficiently analogous fashion that avoids inventing entirely new words to describe a particular threefold quality of the necessary {{w|color confinement|inter-quark groupings}}. And he jokingly says that the 20th century physicists that came up with the three color system did this as ad admission that numbers are boring. They could just have called the color charge 1 2 and 3.

:[Miss Lenhart is teaching a class. A boy with spiky hair sits at his desks with his hand raised asking a question. Science Girl sits in front of him looking back at him while leaning an arm on the back of her chair.]

[[Category:Comics featuring Science Girl]]