The one-electron universe postulates that every electron and positron are manifestations of a single particle tracing a single, highly tangled world line through spacetime, sometimes moving forward and sometimes backward in time. A time slice through spacetime intersects this knotted line at many points, each intersection appearing as an individual electron; segments of the line running backward in time appear as positrons. The picture reinterprets pair creation and annihilation as changes in a particle’s time-direction rather than creation or destruction of distinct entities. The hypothesis confronts an empirical asymmetry - far more electrons than positrons are observed - and its originator speculated that the “missing” positrons could be concealed within protons.
The idea was proposed by John Wheeler in 1940 and independently paralleled by Stueckelberg; Richard Feynman adopted the reversed-world-line interpretation and used it as a foundation for his 1949 theory of positrons, publicly crediting Wheeler for the insight that all electrons share identical charge and mass because they are the same particle. Yoichiro Nambu extended the viewpoint to general particle-antiparticle processes, framing creation and annihilation as mere reversals of motion in time rather than absolute beginnings or endings.
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