electron issues

Discussion in 'Physics & Math' started by bestofthebest, Dec 2, 2009.

  1. bestofthebest Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    56
    right.
    i know plenty about electron shells, orbitals, spin, blah blah etc....
    i cannot however get my head around any of it
    you get all this nonsense about electrons staying in 'orbit' because of centrefugal/centripetal force or whatever but electrons don't actually have orbits so what on earth is going on in there
    i know that this is a very complex question and hard to answere with any serious precision but... what is really going on in an atom, what is an electron actually doing as it goes about its day in a p orbital or an s orbital and so on...
    if you can give me any better way of thinking about it i would much appreciate it.
     
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  3. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
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    The term "orbit" is misleading. It's more a statement of energy than distance (e.g. it's not an orbit the way a planet orbits the Sun).
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital
     
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  5. kurros Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    793
    Yes it is quite strange to try and imagine. Possibly the most intuitive picture I can offer is for you to stop thinking about it like a particle and instead imagine it as a distribution of charge, like a cloud floating around the atomic nucleus. The probability distribution of the orbital can actually be thought of as a charge distribution, so the cloud behaves as if there is more charge in some places than others. A charged cloud would surely just hang around an oppositely charged blob (nucleus), if it had some amount of kinetic energy associated with it to keep it from collapsing.
    This is only a vague picture though, quantum mechanics fixes the shape and behaviour of the orbitals very precisely. The angular momentum thing is a bit misleading, because some orbitals have no orbital angular momentum and should therefore collapse according to classical intuition. The uncertainty principle stops this happening though, because if the electron were to fall closer to the nucleus, its position would be better defined, creating greater uncertainty in it's momentum, thus giving it enough energy to stay away from the nucleus.
    It really does require a different way of thinking to classical mechanics though.
     
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  7. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    19,252
    Although it never actually stops me thinking of little balls whirling round a tiny little "sun".

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    The nifty diagrams on the linked Wiki page give some idea along those lines.
     
  8. Acitnoids Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    704
    You can think of the electron as being smeared out along the spherical radius which determines its primary (n) / sub (s, p, d, f, g, ...) shell. Each electron can collapse into one of two energy states (max upper state: n1=s2, n2=p5, n3=d10, n4=f17 ... and max lower state state n1=s1, n2=p3, n3=d8, n4=f15 ...). If you look at Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Fluorine and Neon. The electrons in the outer most p shell will "rise up" in a different configuration than the outer most p shell found in Indium, Tin, Antimony, Tellurium, Iodine and Xenon. The s shell is an exception. You can think of it as a "core channel or tunnel" that allows for the different electron energy configurations.
     

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