Morning All. I had a thought yesterday. Are atoms actually spherical? Can they be squished? Could they be cubes? Obviously, the models use spheres, as it would be hard to visualise orbits in a cube, and we get to find a use for spherical co-ordinates here and there... but is there anything that says atoms must be spherical? Talking about an isolated atom here. I thought about STM pictures of solids, and the lil spherical bumps - could they be attributed to the E-field and not necessarily indicative of the atom shape? Cheers. Tulip.
I feel like an idiot now. Obviously we can solve the SWE and get different orbital shapes... but would they be contained inside a sphere of somethingness?
I am tempted to ask what, precisely, you mean by "spherical". Yes, I know what definition you could give. My point is that the definition requires very specific measurements. Not only is it not technically possible to make those measurements, quantum mechanics itself forbids such measurements at the atomic level. An atom not only is "not" spherical, the very idea of "shape" is meaningless here. You might as well ask what color an atom is!
Halls: Ive been beginning to realise this since I posted Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Thanks.
We've come a long way since the atomists. It's too bad quantum mechanics had to ruin the fun by being completely against our intuition.
I think it will be interesting in the future, when Quantum Theory becomes fore more embedded in our culture (usually when we find a practical use for it) and Children start to grow up learning about it. In my experience children will believe anything their told, its only later in life they may start to question it. For instance, Santa Clause. It goes against all intuition that someone like that exists, yet children believe. The part I think will be interesting is what happens when quantum theory IS intuitive for Children because they've grown up with it and have always believed thats how things work. Think they'll be able to take it farther than we have because of this? -AntonK
The problem is, quantum theory doesn't really have many simply analogies to explain it. Can you really teach kids complicated math?
I don't think kids need analogies all the time. Analogies are good to explain to adults because they have such a predefined universe in their head, you must compare everything new to something they've already seen. If I tell a child that everything in the universe is made of tiny atoms and each atom has electrons but these electrons arent really anywhere in particular, they're all around the atom and its impossible to know exactly where it is, the child may not understand, and the child may question "why", but the child will most likely believe me. Now that in itself is not really any good since there is no math to back it up, but later when the math comes along, I believe the ideas will be much more native to the child than to you or I. -AntonK
are you saying that its possible the atom is being "pulled' by the e-field to create the spherelike image,ok would cubes have orbits?I would have to remember where it was so I could reference it but I once saw pictures of "atomic clouds" that were capture on film which were seen through a microscope, but the term"cloud" would imply spherical or at least in that instance but with an ever-changing world, it is not wrong to consider your hypothesis, think beyond the box
But there is still the problem of intuition hardwired in the brain from common experience. As much as you tell a child, their experience will still be the guiding light in understanding the world. When they get old enough to try and learn QM, and actually see what it actually means, they will compare it to experience. It's easy to plant a vague idea in one's head, but when they try to get a precise meaning of it, intution gets in the way. This is the same problem people have with space. Intuition is even worse for quantum theory though.
are you small enough, or can you see small enough to see what really goes on, use what you have learned, experiment, investigate, come to your own conclusion!
Just get your hands a decent QM text book and it will show you the weird shapes of the probailty distrib. for electrons at different energy levels.
It had this in my chemistry textbook. The shapes of the basic s, p, and d orbitals, well you can define them as the probability region in which the electrons are going to be found 95% of the time; presumably working from the "greatest density" region to the "least density" region. Defining it like that, the s orbital is spherical, the p orbital comes in three different orientations, imagine them being along the xyz axis, and look like dumbells; the d orbitals are very funky and basically just like a very complicated set of p-orbitals, except for one in which there's this sort of torus thing around a central dumbell, and the f-orbitals are veeeery funky. I don't know what exactly they look like, and probably wouldn't be able to visualize it if I had it drawn out for me.
