Sunday, March 22, 2015

Freaky Fzx Friday: Wave <==> Particle Duality

ELECTRONS DO NOT ORBIT THE NUCLEUS LIKE PLANETS ORBIT THE SUN.

Don't feel bad if you thought they did since even the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission thinks so.  Check out their chosen symbol:


Even though the electrons have almost nothing to do with NUCLEAR fission, that's what they put on their main page.




Even "The Big Bang Theory" (I watch it for the science) gets the atom symbol wrong.


We've known for a century that electrons don't orbit the nucleus but the Bohr model is very useful so we just teach that to our students and rarely mention that they don't.  We should tell the whole story more often.

The fact is that electrons only sometimes act like particles.  Light, normally a wave, is also sometimes a particle.  The distinction between waves and particles is unclear when we get down to the tiny scale of fundamental particles.  Both electrons and gamma rays travel as waves and collide as particles and it creates some interesting paradoxical analogies.

Back when MinutePhysics was actually a minute long, he would split some topics into two parts.

Wave Particle Duality Part 1

Wave Particle Duality Part 2

Since electrons exist and travel as probability waves, we only know exactly where they are when we find them.  The electron cloud model reflects that reality by showing the probability of finding an electron in a given energy level.


Orbital shape based on probability

So light waves are often not waves and electrons are often not particles.  That's why Heisenberg was so uncertain that they named a principle after him.



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