If an electron is thought if more as a wave than a particle, how does it have a mass?

Question

Thought of*

In: Physics

Answer 1

Without going deep into quantum theories etc, you can think about it like this:

We can define mass as the thing that sets the ratio between the force acting on an object and its acceleration. We can measure that and see that the electron must have a mass.

Another way is that according to General relativity, every massless particle must move at the speed of light. Electrons don’t move at the speed of light – therefore they must have mass.

As a final note – in most contexts I’d say it’s not the the electron is a wave, but that it displays wave like properties. The difference is important exactly because we want to say that the electron has a mass and a charge and a radius and other things that it’s hard(er) to relate to waves. We can do that and still say that an electron location is space is determined by a probability density wave function.