The atom model with the electrons going around the nucleus, is inspired by the solar system. The better model doesn’t look anything alike. This is a naturalistic circular fallacy
If atoms were like the solar system, all of the electron orbits would lose energy and decay by emitting electromagnetic radiation.
The same type of decay does occur in the solar system as the planets emit gravitational radiation, but the decay rate is so miniscule we can’t really detect it.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
Could you explain what you mean by “emitting gravitational radiation”? Gravity is how we perceive distortions in spacetime, the strength of which being determined by the mass of the objects. I understand that orbits can “decay”, but that is not the same as radioactive decay.
General relativity is famously difficult to understand, and I don’t claim to fully understand it, so I’m going to fall back to the famous rubber sheet model.
Imagine the Earth in empty space. The mass of the Earth causes spacetime curvature that extends outward away from the Earth. However, if you look a single little patch of spacetime at some distance, say, 1000 km away, that little patch doesn’t know that it has to be curved because the Earth is 1000 km away. It doesn’t know where the Earth is. It just knows that its neighboring patch is a little bit more curved in the direction that leads to Earth, and its other neighbor is a little bit less curved going away from Earth. This essentially restates the principle of locality: all physics is local physics, and there is no spooky action at a distance.
Now imagine that the Earth moves by some small distance dx in a small time dt. Going back to our little patch of spacetime, it doesn’t know that the Earth moved. So how does it change its curvature to match the new position of the Earth? It changes when its neighbors change. When the Earth moves, the spacetime immediately near the Earth stretches and bends first, then spacetime a little further away, and so on and so on. This process doesn’t happen instantaneously; it takes time for changes to propagate to longer distances. The theory predicts that disturbances and ripples will propagate via waves, called gravitational waves, and that these waves travel at the same speed of light as electromagnetic waves.
Notice I called these spacetime waves “gravitational waves.” It is common to use the term “gravity waves” for typical water waves, of the kind you might see at the beach. Those are not the same type of wave.
Now let’s talk about energy. The Earth in the solar system has some energy, including translational and rotational kinetic energy, gravitational potential energy as it sits in the Sun’s gravity well, and of course its own thermal energy and rest mass. Waves have the ability to transport energy from one location to another without transporting matter, mass, or electric charge. Spacetime waves are not any different. Because the Earth is moving in a periodic motion, it produces a periodic spacetime wave that propagates outward away from the solar system, and that spacetime wave carries some amount of energy away from the solar system. Where does that energy come from? It comes from the Earth, mainly from the Earth’s kinetic energy.
So the story is that the gravitational waves are very, very, very slightly causing the Earth to slow down in its orbit. And following the laws of orbital mechanics, this causes the Earth to fall closer to the Sun. The result is that over the long term, the radius of the Earth’s orbit gets smaller. Alternatively, the Earth’s circular orbit is an illusion, and it’s actually spiraling inward on a very, very, tightly packed spiral. That’s what I meant by “orbital decay.”
I find it hard to overstate just how small this gravitational radiation effect is for a typical solar system situation. We have an observatory called LIGO that can detect gravitational waves. It can measure a variation in distance of a tunnel of several kilometers down to well less than a single proton diameter. (Remember, this is trying to detect disturbances in space and time itself). Even still, it is only able to detect gravitational waves from the most powerful kinds of gravitational events–mergers of black holes and the like.
Essentially: Spacetime is very “stiff” and gravity is very weak.
That was a great read, thank you
Yes, because everybody knows the earth is in the sun’s p orbital
What if our solar system is just another balloon animal???
There are better manners to avoid the sleep
There was a guy on the net years ago who claimed that the entire universe is an electron on a plutonium atom. He made a religion out of it, wrote hymns to the atom (or, more precisely, changed the words of Christian hymns, clumsily fitting in references to plutonium atoms) and even legally changed his name to Archimedes Plutonium.
Each galaxy is a neuron of God’s mind.
I thought of this on the toilet when I was 14
Thanks, Neil degrasse Tyson
Doesn’t take a scientist to think about. We learn in middle school, atoms are mostly empty space, we learn small electrons revolve around a larger nucleus. All it takes a little imagination to put two and two together.
Yeah, we all learned it, you’re not special. I was calling you pretentious, not smart lol
So why is it keeping anyone up at night?
Edit: me not being special was my point, are you alright?
I’m alright, just misunderstood your original comment and tried to make a joke, my bad.
Look, I’m not saying our universe exists as a node in an infinite fractal of repeating universes, but one of these is the largest structure we can see and another is the smallest:
Voroni pattern. It shows up in nature all the time.
That’s what the universes above and below us say too!
“Quod est superius est sicut quod inferius, et quod inferius est sicut quod est superius.”
“That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above.”
God doesn’t play dice but he sure does repeat the same tune. I believe this same pattern is observable in our brains when neurons fire is it not?
There’s probably some math which explains the consistency of the pattern.
What is the average length of something very small (Plank length, electron penis, whatever) and the biggest thing (observable universe distance, actual universe length) ?
Hopefully around 6 inches otherwise I’m screwed
Around here we use the metric system. You’ve been downgraded to 6 cm
Honestly the visual representation of the atom is just a simplified artist’s rendition. It’s more acceptable to treat the atom’s components as charge fields filled with very high energy contained by nuclear forces. That said, the planets with molten cores and the sun also have their own electromagnetic fields so maybe the concept isn’t so far off.
It would be fun to see the planets zipping around in random locations in their orbit. And if you kick one hard enough, it pops over to another orbit and emits a huge ass photon when it pops back.
The galaxy is in Orion’s belt.
Or that the observable universe could be inside of a black hole. Don’t watch too many black hole videos before bed.
Planet 9 is not a primordial black hole and it can’t hurt you. 🙀
From my understanding of primordial black holes, if one were so close as to be in our solar system, it is very small.
Since it’s so small, it would have fizzled out through hawking radiation output a long time ago.
So yes, planet 9 is NOT a black hole that can hurt you.
Now, a pocket of warped spacetime that will one day spawn a Chaos Demon? Maybe.
It still fucks with me that we went from 9 planets to 8, pour one out for Pluto
That’s messed up
