Science Memes

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submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Electrons do orbit like planets in the solar system however they're also waves. Which is what gives the set radii they can orbit at and keeps it all stable. The orbits can and do change due to the emission or absorption of certain quanta of radiation.

So saying like is fine. It's not an exact description but more of a simile to help understanding. They do orbit like a solar system. Saying electrons orbit the same as a solar system would be incorrect. That's when the maths doesn't work and the electrons orbit would decay.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

that is not what i've learned, afaik electrons do not orbit with any sort of movement, and in fact talking about positions and movements at all on such a small scale is misleading.

What i've learned is that electrons exist as a probability cloud, with a certain chance to observe them in any given position around the atom depending on the orbital and the amount of other electrons.

Comparing it to gravitational orbits is just basically entirely incorrect, and certainly isn't going to help someone pass advanced physics classes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

If they don't orbit with any kind of movement then what does that say about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle?

We know their mass. So once observed we would know everything about them.

Unless your saying they just some how jump from one random point in that probability cloud to another?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

i'm not sure why you think the uncertainty principle is a "gotcha", it specifically states that you can't know both the position and momentum of a particle and thus explicitly contradicts your claim that we'd know everything about them because we know their mass.

I can't be arsed to write out a whole scientific paper here so i'll just link to the probability cloud model of orbitals and hope you can make sense of that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

You specifically said "electrons do not orbit with any kind of movement"

So by your own argument they're not moving. We know the mass. So if we find one by your logic we know everything about it.

Yes that is the probability cloud model well done.

However my point again. You seem to think saying this renders the simile of planetary orbit obsolete. It doesn't it's a simile. It's a way of explaining something that doesn't have to exactly explain it.

If someone said "that fell on my head like a ton of bricks" would you go and examine the object and check it was exactly a ton of bricks or that it exactly exhibited the properties of a ton of bricks?

Or perhaps would you understand something from that about what had happened to them.

You may find this useful. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simile

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Ok, hear me out for curiosity sake. What happens if you slow down time to magnitudes less then you can observe?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

The passage of time is always consistent for the observer, in that a clock next to them will always tick at the same interval. The tidal wave planet from Interstellar is a good example of this, in that only a short time had elapsed for the people on the surface, but back home on earth over 20 years went by. -Edited, didnt explain correcty the first time