Movement of electrons in atomic orbitals

Discussion in 'Chemistry' started by Muzaffar, Jul 1, 2013.

  1. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Everything pointed at you (your posts) is not necessarily pointed. In this case, it's the flat tip of an eraser.

    Yes I'm aware of what it says.

    No, I never mentioned Bohr. In the first place you were talking about Hydrogen, for which this concern is moot. In the second place, I said Balmer had no way of knowing that his discovery was a special case of the general rule Rydberg would stumble onto a few years later. The history of this is one of incremental successes leading to refinements in understanding, contrary to the way you put it.

    That was what Balmer had no way of knowing, that he was seeing a subset of the higher permutations. Hence my remarks.
     
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  3. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    A descriptive way to explain electrons in orbitals is connected to the particle wave nature of electrons. Since electrons act as both particles and waves, and since electron orbitals are defined by wave functions, as the waves add, the particles paths become defined by the wave addition, since the wave is dominant, with respect to the particles.

    Say we have a boat making a wake in the water. The boat is analogous to particle and in this case the waves follows the action of the boat/particle. But in the case of wave functions, the waves lead and the boat has to follow the waves due to wave addition. This scenario is like the boat in a swimming pool. The boat starts off as the particle making waves, but as the waves reflect off the walls of the pool, they add a wave force against the boat, which starts to direct the boat; wave leads the particle.

    Picture a wave tank with two wave generators, one at each side of the tank, with the wave generators 180 degrees out of phase. Since crests and troughs will cancel in the middle, due to the 180 degree phase difference, there was be wave silences in the middle of the tank, even though each wave generator is pushing energy into the water from both sides. There is hidden energy. If we add a partition to the silence in the middle, the hidden energy would reappear as a wave rising on one side and water sinking on the other side. Electron transitions are connected to partitions in the silence of wave functions, with the particle following the rising and falling waves.
     
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  5. Layman Totally Internally Reflected Valued Senior Member

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    I don't think a quantum jump would have to be instantaneous, just that there may be some unknown process that works at an action at a distance that causes the jump.

    Define coupling "resonance", wouldn't a coupling "resonance" have to transfer that information instantaneously if it was resonating or not?

    I don't think it would be from the initial and final states, but a problem of coupling resonance between the intermediary state during the jump. In other words I think the electron would only have to instantaneously "know" the locations it should start the jump and the locations that it should finish the jump, but that does not mean that it would have to instantly jump from one location to another.

    I don't think it is a coincidence that the orbitals of electrons in the atom are a thin shell of electron clouds. Quantum physicist could have said that there where just different lengths of seaweed growing on the atom, and that is why we see different spectral lines from them. But they didn't, I am just saying that electrons traveling around the atom in these thin shells of electron clouds can be seen as a literal interpretation of what is actually going on and there may be some unknown reasons for that.

    I think the Schrodinger Equation may just be incomplete as there is not a consensus on what interpretation of the Schrodinger Equation to even take. There may be some type of superluminal communication that would be necessary to then create a more accurate Schrodinger Equation, but then if you assume that no information can travel faster than the speed of light then this more accurate theory could never be found. Even quantum entanglement has been shrugged off as not actually sending information faster than the speed of light even though there is an action at a distance that is going on, but what if quantum entanglement is not the only process that operates at an action at a distance? In a unified theory it would seem that it would have to have some other influences on other quantum mechanical properties if quantum entanglement actually does operate with an action at a distance.
     
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  7. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    This is a complex subject, to which we can't really do justice in discussion forum exchanges. I hope I've given you enough of a flavour for you to do a bit more reading: there are some Wiki articles which take things a bit further. But I don't think I can go much further here - not least because, although I was an avid student of Peter Atkins' Quantum Chemistry lectures at university, it was 40 years ago!
     
  8. Tero Registered Member

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    76
    The orbitals have the shapes you read in the book. The molecule also has orbitals (the bonds). Look in wikipedia under homo and lumo orbital. The movement from orbital to orbital can be thought of as motion.
     
  9. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Not action at a distance, but photoelectric interaction.

    The information content of the photon-electron interaction is energy. There is a slight delay in the absorption of a photon, described as Poisson distributed.

    Electrons accept and donate energy quanta that correspond to the change in quantum number. If the energy (wavelength) supplied by the photon is sufficient to promote an electron from one orbital to another then that's what will happen.

    Not coincidence. A consequence of Schroedinger's eqn. http://winter.group.shef.ac.uk/orbitron/AOs/3d/equations.html

    Because it has a rational explanation.

    Duality places the electron at an orbital in the form of a standing wave.

    What is known is the uncertainty.

    That's not a matter of completeness, just the nature of the wavefunction

    There is nothing inaccurate about uncertainty.

    No, it's all moot.

    Moot.

    Electron-photon interaction is not action at a distance.

    Moot.
     
  10. Professor Pudd'n Registered Member

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    I just read in Scientific American that electrons in the heaviest elements, I think from Francium on up, move at relativistic speeds, i.e., near the speed of light. As I recall, this applies only to the electrons nearest the nucleus, or those in the first s and p orbitals, but I'd have to reread that part.

    Anyway, for these very heavy elements, the normal rules of chemistry are slightly wrong; they break down. Higher physics -- almost beyond current understanding -- may be required to figure out how these elements will behave in certain conditions.
     
  11. arauca Banned Banned

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    What you were it does not count , what counts is what you are now. I had my chemistry in the mid 1960 , the point is how do we keep it on daily bases . And I believe forums similar like this , stimulate us not to rust away, and I have noticed that you have started to brush up which is great.
     
  12. arauca Banned Banned

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    What is the behavior of electrons during phosphorescence, As I see, the electron might be pushed to a higher orbit wen stimulated by a source of photons , but as the source is removed the phosphorescence remains for a longer period. So why is the delay
     
  13. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    It has to do with forbidden transitions.

    When you expose a material to light, you excite its electrons to a higher energy level.

    In the case of a fluorescent material, they decay back to the ground state almost immediately, emitting a photon with a characteristic wavelength.
    In the case of a phosphorescent material they decay to an intermediate state. The intermediate state is a forbidden state because as well as an orbital transition it requires a spin-flip transition. Because forbidden transitions happen only rarely, the glow is persistent for an extended period of time.

    Another example of a forbidden transition is the green colour of glass. Glass is green because of a forbidden iron transition. The reason you can only see the colour when look through a bulk sample, for example, the edge of a pane of glass, is because the transition happens only rarely.

    The 21cm line in Hydrogen is another forbidden transition.
     
  14. arauca Banned Banned

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    It is a nice term "forbidden transition is the green colour of glass " but what is happening , doe the electron gets frozen in the upper orbital ? and decays slowly ?
     
  15. Forceman May the force be with you Registered Senior Member

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    The electrons move exactly within the orbitals with exact momentum and therefore can exit the orbitals to other orbitals making them s (S) orbitals. Sigma configurations within an electron cloud configure wave equations and electrons have a spin. Then electrons move from quadrant one to quadrant 2. Electrons become negative in quadrant II. Quadrant III and IV are excluded the electron cloud becomes negative and the exact quantum position of an electron becomes known.
     
  16. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    What are you talking about? What specifically do you mean by saying, "Electrons become negative in quadrant II"? Weren't they negative before?
     
  17. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    It's gobbledegook. Sounds to me like either another medical case or an adolescent troll.

    This poster wrote the following in a post last year:"Car dealers like to keep cars the same from keeping cars safe from ionizing radiation. Ions and ion energy and xenergy XE can erupt to a car and bring its price down. Eventually Craigslist is going to take over and in the future there will be no United States and companies will bow down to Craigslist."

    On balance, I think the medical explanation is the more probable of the two. Either way, I don't think a discussion is going to go anywhere.
     
  18. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    Uh, whoa...

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