See my comment. The terms of the question and the totally misleading images are seriously flawed. Concepts that are close enough in the everyday world are not “close enough” at the sub-atomic level.
Electrons and protons don't merge despite being attracted towards each other is because there's a small hill between them. You can push both to the top of the hill by expending energy and in the classical world, they'd stay there but in the quantum world, particles are always jiggling/moving. So they're more likely to be at the bottom of the hill than the top. As for why the hill exists, I guess that's just how quantum fields are structured? There isn't really a good answer to that. Kinda like asking why the electron has a negative charge. It just does
Despite my frivolous comment a month ago, the reason is that electrons are not little particles or balls of matter, they have significant energy even at absolute zero, and normally they do not interact with protons. However, it does sometimes happen that an electron is captured by a proton in the nucleus and converted into a neutron,. This happens about 10% of the time during the radioactive decay ofpotassium-40 (about 0.1% of all potassium) when the K-40 is converted to Ar-40 with the emission of a gamma ray. The other 90% of K-40 decays by emitting a beta ray (fast electron) to become Ca-40.
I don't find it satisfying that the electron cannot fall into the nucleus due to an "uncertainty principle". In fact much of quantum mechanics fails to be explanatory even though it is rather precisely descriptive (but only of probabilities rather than individual events). Some suppose that our "brains just aren't built to understand it" or "the quantum world is so unlike the classical world that it surpasses understanding". Maybe we actually have more to learn about the quantum world. That we can accurately calculate probabilities of events is all well and good, but we lack insight into what is actually going on.
Could QCD play a role in it? If I understand correctly, UUD(ignore UDD as it has no charge) is always moving due to QCD and the color charges. I have to wonder if that and residual strong force from nuclear gluons have a hand in it.
It's the wrong explanation to boot. The stability of atoms is due to lepton number conservation and the mass difference between neutron and proton. The interactions with most nuclei can simply not destroy an electron state. These atoms in their ground state are the lowest stable quantum mechanical state of the quarks/gluons in the nucleus and the electrons. If we put enough external pressure on (or we have an oversupply of protons), then electrons can "fall" into the nucleus because now one additional neutron is the energetically lowest state rather than proton plus electron. That's what a neutron star is made of and that's how electron capture works in certain types of nuclear reactions. This is an endothermic reaction, though, so it requires a large external energy supply, which comes from gravity in case of the neutron star and the electromagnetic force in case of those extra protons.
Well, the thing is, science doesn't promise to "explain." Only to "describe" / "predict." In a lot of cases, especially the ones we learn in high school, you can get an "explanation" of a phenomenon in terms of "lower level" phenomena, and we're often very comfortable accepting those lower level phenomena because we've heard about them our whole lives. But ultimately any theory will reach a "foundational layer" where you have a set of assumptions that just have to be accepted, much like the postulates of geometry. The theory never "explains" these first starting principles. When those assumptions are intuitive, you're fine - it doesn't bother you. When they're not, that's when you get stressed out over it. But nature doesn't really care about your stress level. The uncertainty principle is a fundamental principle of nature that appears in quantum theory as an assumption. Usually it's wired into the theory by specifying that the commutator of conjugate variables is non-zero. This is specified basically as a postulate. So yes, I see how that can be "unsatisfying." But there's not a lot that can be done about it. It's part of what's required in order for the theory to make correct predictions, but we "got it" just by observing the world and recognizing that it's never violated. It's also the reason, primarily, that the precise deterministic physics we learned in high school is only approximate. In our day-to-day world we usually can't SEE the uncertainty, but it's there down in the noise. Sorry - I didn't really mean to firehose you like that. But this is fundamental and the only way to cope with it is just to acknowledge that this is in fact how the world works. You might like this paper: arxiv.org/abs/1810.06981 It basically derives most of physics from one single starting assumption: that at least one conserved quantity must exist in nature. It offers no real PROOF that such a conserved quantity must exist - that's the starting assumption you just have to accept. But once you have that it does a good job of pulling the laws of physics out of the math. It even shows that you don't have to assume the existence of space to start with - it will "show up" on its own as a math consequence of that assumption.
@@KipIngram Physics explains complex phenomena in terms of simple phenomena. We don't teach that sufficiently in schools. There are no proofs in physics and nobody ever said that there would be. Neither does physics start from axioms. Those concepts are reserved for mathematics. You are confused at the level of basic categories.
@@lepidoptera9337 Physics can be divided between experimental physics and theoretical physics, the first one yes its based on empiric evidence and mostly tries to get the rules in order to predict some phenomena, but the second one tries to build a theoretical model in order to not only make predictions, but gain more fundamental understanding, and this second one is the one that does use assumptions to make a model. This part of physics that tries to explain some phenomena does not need simple phenomena in order to explain it, a model can be build with assumptions. In conclusion, axioms and assumptions are used in Physics, but you are right in the part where you say you can't tecnically proof any physical phenomena with 100% certainty that it will always hold true, but that goes more into the philosophy of science than physics itself.
Aside from the video primarily discussing atoms using “old quantum theory only”, at the end, it fails to recognize that for the ground state, the highest probable place for the electron is indeed inside the nucleus (when the probability distribution is written in Cartesian coordinates in 3d). In fact, the electron often spends substantial time within the nucleus. It does not interact or change anything there due to energy considerations--there is not enough energy for a proton and electron to combine to make a neutron--except in special nuclei, where the electron is captured by the nucleus and a proton and electron combine to make a neutron. The reverse process, of creating an electron in the nucleus, does occur in tritium, which can beta decay to He3. If one uses a relativistic formula, the probability distribution within the nucleus is even higher, because the wavefunction actually diverges at the origin. And, of course, zero angular momentum states are possible in an atom. This is one of the old quantum ideas that was incorrect.
when we are talking about electrons and atoms, we mostly talk about stationary state. You might remember that we even consider ψ do not depend on time , so dψ/dt=0, when solwing Shrodinger equation for hydrogen atom. All that stuff with electron capture or beta-decay are not a case.
@@TerraPhysica Of course it is. The electron has a nonzero probability to be inside the nucleus. When energetically favorable, it will eventually undergo the transition. This happens from the ground state. There is no excitation needed to make it occur. It is just a question of whether it is energetically allowed. For stable nuclei, it is not, for unstable, it is. One simply waits long enough and it will occur. It is just one cannot predict precisely when it will occur, just when it will occur on average.
quantum4everyone is correct. By your line of reasoning, electron capture could never occur. Yet, it does. Sure, the Heisenberg effects reduce the probability that the nucleus will capture an electron, but the more important issue is that the neutron and neutrino created by the electron being captured has more mass than the original electron-proton pair. For electron capture processes, there is typically more protons in the nucleus than normal, making it energetically easier for the proton to be separated from the other neutrons there.
I don't see how Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which is a mathematical construct, explains the reality of which force or forces prevent an electron orbit from touching the nucleus.
Ahh! It's not just a mathematical construct; it actually describes what happens. If an electron fell into the nucleus you would know its position and momentum with a greater precision than the principle allows. Therfore it cannot happen. Remember that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle describes reality.
@@pershoremathsandsciencestu9445 An electron-positron pair (positronium) is subject to the same uncertainty and it will annihilate in approx. 100ns (ground state) and live on the order of microseconds if it's decaying from some of the higher states. So, no, uncertainty has absolutely nothing to do with the stability of atoms.
@@pershoremathsandsciencestu9445 Not true, the time dependent relativistic Schrödinger equation does have the electron going through the nucleus part of the time, it does happen. Not a problem since the electron isn't a wave, only it's properties are probability waves, the electron is a point by our best theory as are the quarks in the nucleus.
Here are the three things I have to praise about your presentation! 1st) The Chronology! Thank you for laying out the investigations and question leading up to these discoveries in such a simple and detailed manner. Often, videos discuss ideas independent of the many experiments and considerations that led up to those investigations! 2nd) Thank you for keeping it politically free! It's like when we think 'atom' we have to be told about Einstein's 1905 paper with Brownian motion! But as you have here indicated, as far back as 1897, there were already considerations on the atomic structure of matter. Ludwig Boltzmann also stands out as a figure of importance. The issue as to why it took so long for it to become acceptable is it mattered too much who was the one telling you this as a matter of 'politics!' And finally, 3rd) the transition between the ideas and the illustrations shown. It is indeed impossible to absolutely visualize an atom, but the illustrations you used really help because of the wide variety you used. Please keep up the good work!
Not that I don't value your opinions, just that these flawed concepts you speak of have led to the bearing of SOME fruits, such as the computer and internet through which you are posing these very ideas of yours, yes? In that way, conceptualization of abstract concepts, flawed or otherwise, do help us to get SOME progress in math through the imagining and reimagining of these models. After all, our reality is still formed from these invisible things and in that way they express themselves in some fashion or other and considering them in the same way we do the macro world pulls out these 'expressions' even if not their identities much less their definitions. But guess what? That's fine! We don't need to perfectly understand everything to enjoy some of the practical applications, like you know for example, airplanes? or my iPad? or x-rays, CAT scans...@@johnmalcolm4822
A very complicated non-answer to a simple question. Very often physics amateurs will try to answer a conceptual question with math because they don't truly understand the concepts. We have that here. Further, the math mistake is substituting momentum p in an equation for the UNCERTAINTY in momentum (delta p). The statement delta p= p itself is wrong. So the solution doesn't even answer the question mathematically because it is nonsensical.
19:00 there is no orbit radius of electrons around the nucleus, there is a probability density function. the science in this video was current about 1920, before quantum physics.
Why??? We are already at 13:25, and the graphics artist is still depicting an electron revolving around the nucleus if an atom, but we already know this model is incorrect. Also, the presenter already told us that charged accelerating particles emit radiation, so why is the graphics artist still showing us a misleading, incorrect view of the concepts that the narrator is trying to to teach. When the graphics don't match the words, it's damn confusing vvi think this team needs to go back to square 1 and think about more carefully how to explain these concepts.
I’m more interested in a similar yet different question: If I am an electron how would I differentiate a proton from a positron? How is it that when it’s a positive charge just 1000 bigger than its own mass it can’t annihilate?
"If I am an electron how would I differentiate a proton from a positron" They have different masses, so you definitely would. By the way, there are atom-like structures formed of electron and positron. But positrons cannot form nucleus, because they don't participate in strong nuclear interaction, i.e. don't feel forces of attraction that compensate electric repulsion between them.
the electron is a point particle, a proton is 3 point particles (quarks) with charges in multiples of 1/3. An electron can't annihilate one of those, conservation of charge won't allow that.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt There are videos about beta decay and a related cool thing called electron capture here on youtube... but none have good animation, lolz. Anyway, still worth learning about so type them both together n search as single line
I was hoping for an explanation that would use the tools of classical physics, as my high school students usually melt when quantum mechanics is invoked. The big dilemma for me is to explain why the attraction of opposite charges (which is a dominant concept in high school chemistry) does not take precedence over all other considerations...
Well, the problem is that this is just not a classical phenomenon. The best way to arrive at the answer is to treat the nucleus as a stationary (because it's very massive) central positive charge, and solve Schrodinger's equation in that context. Demand that the solutions have the necessary continuity / smoothness, and what falls out is the standard spherical harmonics for the orbitals we learn about in chemistry. That completely defines the thing. Usually we do this with just a single electron (thus ignoring any other electrons that might be in the atom) so it's really "most right" for hydrogen. But neglecting the other electrons isn't "awful" - we can still learn a lot and in fact we can basically "derive the periodic table." This is one of the nicest examples of very simple physical concepts producing a "large result" (more or less all of chemistry). Another similar example (that you can approach with classical physics, though quantum is still more ideal) is the way Newton's laws of motion applied to molecules of a gas in a statistical way give rise to all of the normal large scale gas laws (Boyle's, Charles's, ideal gas law, etc.) and also the Boltzmann distribution for molecular speeds in equilibrium as a function of temperature. Beautiful stuff. One of the reasons we went and did quantum theory in the first place, though, was that classical theory was incapable of solving certain problems - atomic structure is one of them. Blackbody radiation spectrum is another.
therein lies your problem. The attraction / repulsion of charges is in fact responsible for all considerations. Modern interpretation based off Victorian assumptions refuses to allow this.
on Wikipedia look up 'correspondence principle'. then find 'Generalized correspondence principle' Essentially classical physics is a special case of quantum mechanics. Nature is much deeper than our idea of it. For the kids try this... the center of the electron's charge distribution over space does actually fall on the nucleus. The minimum distribution (radius) is larger than the nucleus because the electron wavelength is much longer than that of the nucleus. In fact inside neutron stars the pressure is enough to collapse an electron and a proton into a new neutron.
@@sonpopco-op9682 Well, "many" considerations, but not all. Electromagnetism explains a LOT. But it doesn't explain gravity and it doesn't explain how the atomic nuclei hold together. That's why we have for forces in nature instead only two - if electromagnetism could do it all, we wouldn't need the other three.
I was hoping for an answer that included the modeling we used to describe the conditions where the exclusion and uncertainty principles are overcome. I think that understanding that would give people a much better answer than just this, it is missing pieces.
The pronounciation is "debroy" not "debrouglie". I realize it's an automated voice, but it just follows the trend of actual science communicators butchering that name almost every time. I feel like only PBS Spacetime has gotten it right, maybe a few others. Edit: I also have to admit, it's really hard for me to focus and take in the information with the incredibly monotone cg voice. Anyway, 'nough nitpicking, thank you for the otherwise great video :)
At 0:58 you discuss how Joseph Thompson discovered the electron. That discussion occurs over a picture of Ernest Rutherford not J. J. Thompson. A picture of Thompson can be found here - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._J._Thomson. Rutherford is pictured again at 1:39.
You should have shown what the modern electron orbitals look like. The orbitals do show some electrons spending time inside the nucleus. They don't remain there, but they do get there.
@@peterfireflylundIt seems electrons only get captured by protons while inside neutron stars. Other times, they're flying in and out and no one is being captured.
Actually, "matter waves" went out in the 1930s, the only waves are probabilities. The electron is a point particle with no size, so are the quarks. The electron does go through the nucleus, the equations of quantum mechanics say it does. By the way there are certain conditions under which the electron can be captured by the nucleus and cause changes there.
A correction: The units of Planck's constant (16:21) are joules _times_ second, not joules _per_ second. And I was dismayed to learn in college that "de Broglie" is pronounced "de broy" but then confirmed that we Americans may pronounce it as it is spelled in our orthography.
You *_can_* pronounce it any way you like. But that won't make it right. The way to pronounce names is as they are pronounced in the language if you have that capability (eg if you can't pronounce the San or Xhosa clicks - don't). However, given that Americans pronounce route as "rowt" rather than the very easy "root" - you lot can't be helped.......
Because they're not really particles orbiting like planets around the sun. They are fluctuations in one of a number of quantum fields which coexist and span the universe.
As far as i know, english spikers pronounce it like that. My native language is russian, and we pronounce it as "de broil", and that is how his name was pronounces in his native french. But I think I must use the pronounciation that is more habitual for english-spaeking listeners, if i make videos in english
@@eeshtarr stem+language background of mine tells me: yes, it’s wrong. But a lot of foreign words are said wrong in other languages, INCLUDING proper nouns, for a number of reason, albeit, at times, rather hilarious ones. On top, there’s no norm for some of them, “say what you think it should sound like” kinda approach. So, just relax. 😊
Even though a proton and electron are attracted to each other, the electron is too shy and fearful to actually approach. So it hangs around the proton it loves, doing it's best to repel any other electrons that would want to get close.
Given the comments, you should have left two things out and emphasized what you brought up in the last 90 seconds. 1. Eliminate the n=0 discussion. It's confusing and doesn't drive the narrative. 2. Too much time spent on Bohr and DeBroglie. I've never seen a decent presentation of DeBroglie 1-D waves fitting into circular orbits. I told my students to skip over that part, and go straight to ... 3. Schrodinger and orbitals. That would also help respond to some comments below: yes electrons Do have a probability of being at the nucleus - specifically, s electrons, but not p, d, or f electrons. What are those? I was hoping this video would address that, but no such luck. Wait until next lecture.
they do fall onto/into the nucleus, we then call the system a 'neutron'.. in neutron stars that's all you have, electrons pushed into the single proton nucleus hence neutral charge.. this also allows for higher density.. the pressure also prevents them from decaying, unlike under earthly conditions where free neutrons decay in 15 minutes.. you also have some neutrino interaction in the process
"in neutron stars that's all you have, electrons pushed into the single proton nucleus hence neutral charge.." Here we talk about steady states of electrons, it's not quite a case
Doesn't this simply beg the question, what is the uncertainty of the proton being in the nucleus of the atom? If we fired a line of protons in a vacuum at two slits wouldn't we also observe such uncertainty. If both are uncertain then we are back with the plum-pudding model just with an asterisk? Perhaps because protons and neutrons are composites of quarks they are less uncertain? If somehow you were to have a concentration of electrons and neutrons in one place, would protons fall into such probability shells? While math is a powerful tool, faulty assumptions will produce faulty answers, one model may have many mathematical solutions. I understand that this is beyond our scope of sight, and is relatively new physics. I just wonder with how convoluted and pointing to math some answers are, how questioned the assumptions inherent were, and how explored all solutions to the equations have been. Sometimes a mistake in Sudoku may not become apparent until much later down the line, then it becomes very difficult to figure out where the faulty assumption was made.
Electron capture: Electron capture (K-electron capture, also K-capture, or L-electron capture, L-capture) is a process in which the proton-rich nucleus of an electrically neutral atom absorbs an inner atomic electron, usually from the K or L electron shells. This process thereby changes a nuclear proton to a neutron and simultaneously causes the emission of an electron neutrino. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_capture
Allow me to ask an absoulte amateur's question: Aren't the electrons in a Neutron star "pressed" into the Protons, so that only Neutrons result? At least this is what I've often read about neutron stars. But if this is true, then it IS possible for n to be zero, no matter how you mathematically proved it to be impossible. Can you enlighten me there?
It seems that one way to describe a neutron is to view it as a hydrogen atom where the electron is in the "zeroth" orbital. Now what happens to Heisenberg?
He is proved wrong! The difference between a proton and neutron is just a quark change; that doesn't reconcile with a neutron being a proton+electron...
Every "why?" rabbit hole ends with "we don't know, it is the way it is". Deepening that rabbit hole is the only thing science attempts to do and does (I am NOT saying that this is bad, it is just a fact). In my opinion, you can never answer every "why?" question because there will always be unknown information. Even if you think you know everything, there will always be questions you don't know you could even ask or haven't imagined at all. Answering a question is only possible after you ask it.
My reaction on seeing the title. It's simply a fact that they don't, just as it's a fact that the speed of light is a constant. Asking 'why' presupposes a reason, in other words an intention. I tend to shy away from suggestions that there is any sort of intent behind the universe because there are far too many people willing to tell you what that is.
@@qwadratix previously, equations for magnetic and electric force were separate and just 'facts', but later people found out a single formula for it. Previously, there were separate equations for gravity on Earth and for stellar objects, but later people found a more fundamental single law behind both. Asking 'why' is attempting to find that more fundamental reason. E.g. to derive C from other constants. Why does C and other free parameters have the value that they have? Don't you suspect that at least some of them will be derived from other values? What if people of the old had this approach? "Why does electric force look so similar to magnetic force? It just does". "Why does silver tarnish? It just does".
The experimentally observed fall of an inner electron ( a 1s electron orbits on the K orbit, an old term) into a neutron deficient nucleus is called K capture, K-Einfang in German. Hence an electron spends some time IN the nucleus before being irreversibly absorbed by a proton. This somewhat contradicts your assertions. The French pronounciation of de Broglie cannot be rendered in English, the last sound is the same as in Italian Cagliostro, Cagliari , as in Spanish calle and as in Portuguese Calvelhe.
A great, high level explanation on what is happening between electrons and the nucleus of an atom. Too bad we still don't have an explanation as to why it has to be that way.
This question was answered by George Goedecke in 1964 when he discovered the non-radiation condition which had been hidden in Maxwells equations for 100 years. He discovered that non radiation occurs when the radius of the atomic electron equals ncT/2pi where n is normalized by the fine structure constant. This equation gives the r to be the Bohr radius , or .53 times 10 to the minus 10. That is the true size of the atomic electron.
@@TerraPhysica yes, but your question is technically nonsense. Protium is what happens when an electron falls on to a nucleus. It makes a stable atom. I think you meant to ask "why don't all electrons fall into all the protons and just make neutrons everywhere?'". That's a better question, and doing some research you will find that neutrons that aren't in neutron star have a halflife of about 10 minutes. So then your answer changes up a bit... Electrons can fall into protons, but electrons behave with strange quantum rules. We can't always be sure if where these things actually are, and electrons have some wave like properties. A formula that seems to work is called the Schrodinger's Equation. The electron and protons create a system that has apparent structure because the bound state of the electrons around positve potential wells... It gets complicated fast.
@@kayakMike1000 Electrons are quanta of energy. We teach this at the high school level for photons. The definition of a quantum of energy doesn't change just because it has charge and rest mass.
@@TerraPhysicaI for one found your video entertaining and educational. I learnt a few things and liked how you repeated and reworded some points in case the viewer didn’t catch them the first time. There will always be people who want to gatekeep knowledge and spread their ego through comment sections, I hope it doesn’t dissuade you
@@ShaneH42 Fortunately there will also always be people who want to correct mistakes in science videos on UA-cam. Students will watch these videos to help them learn these topics - it is very important that misconceptions don't spread through sloppy YouTubing. Electrons absolutely can enter the nucleus, and to say the can't is not merely simplifying a complex topic, it is just plain wrong.
The electrons do NOT flow IN the wire. They just vibrate OUTSIDE the wire. What did Heaviside say? What does Eric Dollard say? How did Tesla create devices that drew energy directly from the earth?
I'd say when an electron falls onto a proton you have an atom. In short, what we see IS an electron as close as it can get to a proton, ground state. What I mean is, an electron free of a proton can be either wave or particle in behavior. But, once falling onto a proton it is just a fuzzy wave, close as it can get like that.
Technically, electrons _do_ fall on the positively charged nucleus. These are called "atoms" and they are often found electrically neutral. There's a _better_ question to ask, like... Why does there seem to be a structural relationship between positve nuclei and the electrons? I think the idea of electron orbits like planets orbiting a star caused the confusion. Subatomic paricles behave like waves, electrons are no exception. The wave like nature of the electron exists on top of the nuclei.
@@GIRGHGH well, you fall until you cant anymore because something else stops that attractive force. Electrons fall into the nucleus until something stops them from falling, the attractive force between the electrons and the protons is satisfied. The electron, being a subatomic particle... Well, it exists as a wave as well as a particle. It's bound to the nucleus through electrostatic forces... But the tricky thing is... Electron wave-like nature makes it much more likely to stand out from the nucleus, it's not that it's really orbiting, it's that you don't really know where it is. In the simplest case, you could have a neutron, but strangely the electron here will escape in a decay event. Then you have hydrogen 1, which is a lower energy than a neutron. The electron fell to the ground state, which is a probability of finding the electron near by the proton but most likely within 1 radius of hydrogen.
Yep. They also push the electrons of neighbouring atoms. Electrons are quite promiscuous. Their behaviour of weaving themselves according to the uncertainty principle even extends to weaving with electrons around other atoms, and that’s how atoms get stuck together in covalent bonds, such as is found in metals and ceramics. They also stick atoms together when atoms have more or less electrons than protons - in this case, the protons’ positive charge leaks out and attracts the electrons of neighbouring atoms, creating ionic bonding such as is found in salts. In this case though, the bond lengths are longer and there is no sharing of orbitals, and that’s why ionic bonds are so weak compared to covalent ones.
hi thanks for the reply ,yes oxidation and reduction is very interesting but i was referring to the objects protons in relation with their electrons ,when we push an object or hit it our electrons touch the objects electrons and transfer the kinetic energy to that point and then that energy will be transfered to the rest of the object ,so when a proton of that object moves its because it follows i think the electron it is attached @@simontillson482
I just thought of this. Electrons and protons don't merge despite being attracted towards each other is because there's a small hill between them. You can push both to the top of the hill by expending energy and in the classical world, they'd stay there but in the quantum world, particles are always jiggling/moving. So they're more likely to be at the bottom of the hill than the top. As for why the hill exists, I guess that's just how quantum fields are structured? There isn't really a good answer to that. Kinda like asking why the electron has a negative charge. It just does 🤷
The video explains that quantum model is better than planetary one, because in planetary one it's not explained how electrons not slow down and fall on to the atom due to always right maxwells laws which tells accelerating electrons will emit light and lose kinetic energy. But in quantum model it's still not answered, only difference is that there are more rules from which fixed orbitals are emerged, it still doesn't answer why electrons don't loos energy due to emitting radiation. What do I miss ? I am totally not physicist forgive me if my question is stupid.
does this still apply when the electron is not in orbit around a proton? if you increase pressure enough such that another proton enters its neighbour's electron cloud, does the electron start making weird orbits or are you by that time call it nuclear fusion?
"if you increase pressure enough such that another proton enters its neighbour's electron cloud, does the electron start making weird orbits or are you by that time call it nuclear fusion?" in this case electron will be consumed by a proton, and we will get a neutron. This is called electron capture (i hope i translate the term correctly)
I think atoms can give or take smaller amounts of energy to move up down their electrons in orbits; but when it comes to merge electrons and the nucleus it needs larger amounts of gravity pressure and temperature (energy) such as the one the star can do at its end phase. So to move from n=1 to n=0 it requires a lot of energy.
We have no reason to believe that an electron cannot pass completely through the 'positive' nucleus unaffected. It is simply the ignorance of what "charges" actually are, that even raises this question.
Charges are properties that are conserved under the Poincare group, which is the symmetry of the physical vacuum. We know all of this and have for more than half a century. Probably closer to a full human lifetime. It's just not something we teach at the high school level, yet. Eventually we will. This isn't rocket science. It's more like chemistry in a sense.
@@jackebinger5144 I wish we could capture that energy here on Earth in some kind of a reactor. Maybe quantum tunneling would help like it does with fusion in stars.
@@sdal4926 Imagine what would happen if the Pauli Exclusion principle was suddenly suspended throughout the entire universe...my guess is that all of everything would suddenly collapse into a quark singularity.
Yes but protons and electrons are not the same particles, therefore the Pauli’s exclusion doesn’t apply? I’m not sure but Pauli’s exclusion is a simplification of more complex explanation that uses the assumption that you deal with 2 (or more) similar particles. So it explains why every electrons doesn’t fall in the ground state, but not why the ground state is not n=0. Correct me if I’m missing something :)
@@starventure I suspect every structure to disintegrate but not into a singularity. Just a same size universe where what matter exists is in a form we can't understand.
Nice discussion. I like to teach my students that classical physics proves that atoms can't exist (electrons would radiate away their energy according to the L'armor formula ) Since atoms do exist, classical physics must be wrong. The only flaw in your video I find at 20:00 when you show the 'electron cloud' as an apparent ring, and then state we cannot visualize the shape of such clouds. Indeed we can. Just look up s- and p- orbitals in a chemistry book. They are the solutions to the 3D Schroedinger equation.
Saying something doesn’t behave physically because of an abstract principle is not an acceptable physical explanation. But it is all we have. “Faith is the essence of things unseen” is an abstract principle that enables theological belief. “You cannot measure the position and momentum of an object” is an abstract principle that enables quantum mechanics. In both cases no acceptable physical explanation is forthcoming. It is the ultimate in frustration.
I am very unclear why anyone would at first assume they should fall - electrons move at the speed of light. The fact they can be captured into orbits is more surprising than the idea that they don't fall in, or rather, it would seem easier to assume at first that's strange than electrons stick around for any length of time such that things exist as they do.
EDIT - oh, I guess with that old model of them not moving around makes that make sense. But why would anyone today have that confusion when that model was never taught widely, and the alternative was widely for over a hundred years by this point.
@@tonywells6990 An electron is a quantum of energy. Quanta only "exist" when an irreversible energy exchange has taken place. "The quantum" is the amount of energy, momentum, angular momentum and charge that the two systems have exchanged. It's like an accounting quantity. It is not like a moving object.
So all physicists had to do to explain why electrons don't fall onto the nucleus was write an equation that says the electron can't fall onto the nucleus. Genius. I wish my job was that easy.
@@lepidoptera9337 🤣🤣🤣I didn't fail science class. Not even close. But it certainly is a failure for you to make such an ignorant, and wrong, assumption.
@@AnAntidisestablishmentarianist I can only judge you by your own statements. If you don't want to sound like somebody who failed science class, then don't make statements like somebody who failed science class. Now is your time to rise. So far you keep falling. ;-)
@AnAntidisestablishmentarianist. Exactly correct. An electron does not fall on to the nucleus because the electron does not fall on to the nucleus. We write a Schrödinger Equation that says the electron does not fall on to the nucleus. Then we believe the equation, even though the equation is completely alien to our experience in the macroscopic world. But the answer is still "it does not because it does not". Your snarky comment -- alleging that creating quantum physics was easy -- is funny for those of us who like to laugh.
@@jwestney2859 Yes, that was total bullshit. Dudes, you need to stop repeating every bit of bullshit you hear. ;-) That deriving quantum mechanics was hard is true. But that doesn't make quantum mechanics hard to understand AFTER it was derived by giants. The problem is that none of you seem to be listening to what those giants found out for your benefit. That's just intellectual laziness at work;-)
Page 6:12 Lost of electric charge/force/energy of an orbiting electron move it to a higher orbit and not lower. On the other hand lost of momentum takes it to a lower orbit. If electron charge loss continues the orbit may be too large ending in 1. a drifting electron or 2. Gravity kicks in bind the charge-less electron (now subatomic particle) at the nucleus. Could both the nucleus and subatomic particles were attached to one another originally, only to exhibit a difference charge when forced apart, electrically?
It will cause the orbit to spiral in as it will lose angular momentum and the strongly attractive electric force will take over resulting in the orbit to spiral in, not out We are talking about electrons and protons here not celestial bodies
At 5:45, you stated that an accelerating electron should lose energy, but your quantum model removes that requirement by stating that ... we don't know how the electron moves or if the electron moves at all ?!? To me, that is a little bit gross: you freely "wave" away the problem of NOT having to lose energy, and thus, not having to explain it, isn't it?
More importantly, where does all of the energy come from when the nucleus is split? How is this energy generated, and how can we control it safely? Is it possible to start a chain reaction in a super collider that could cause major destruction? How many things do we think we know about atomic elements that we know only by our inadequate linguistic explanations?
Congratulations to this very digestable an interesting presentation! One wish: Please reduce the visual footage to illustrations of what you are actually trying to explain. There is no need to add "pretty wiggle patterns" just to keep the viewers eyes busy. This has become a huge niussance on UA-cam. You don't overdoe it here, but still, the tendency is present. The best presentations on UA-cam are those which allow the viewer to "let it all in" without having to bother to mentally sort out trash and frill.
Since I'm not a physicist nor a mathematician I suppose my view could be easily dismissed, but since the proton is also moving through space and not stationary finding the position of the electron would be impossible without knowing the speed of the proton thus also effecting the orbit.
Relative position. Same as how you can observe the position/velocity of the moon in the sky relative to the earth without knowing that the earth is even moving. Or tell that another car on the highway is going faster than you even if you don’t know your own speed.
@@robertlivingston1634 Both are answerable questions, but I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head. But what’s relevant here is the concept of relative motion. “Our speed IN the galaxy” doesn’t really make sense. It’s our speed relative to the center of our galaxy that’s the relevant concept here. And again, it’s a number that I don’t know off the top of my head.
@@kansasllama the galaxy is moving through space and I think at best we could make a theoretical estimate for that speed. As far as our position and speed we're traveling around the galaxy, that's most likely a theoretical estimate also. I've seen articles about how far other galaxies are away from us and by measuring light scientists can determine how fast they're moving apart, but that's not the same as how fast we're actually moving through space.
I've always said that the electron is bound to the nucleus via the nucleus wave function energy, thus the wave function of the electron is direct related to the nucleus wave function. Thus different atoms have different "looks" or signatures when it comes to wave functions. The electron is a kind of signature of the nucleus and the nucleus can be analized via the electrons around it. The electrons and nucleus are interlinked. The electrons cannot "fall" into the atom because the wave energy onto the electron eminates from the nucleus energy function. Here an electron is a wave function of the atom. When in free space unbound by a nucleus an electron is a particle due to a lack of wave function energy linked by a nucleus.
So let me see if I understood what you said. You are saying that even though the positive and negative charges do attract, the electron won't fall on the proton because of the uncertainty principle and math? Because then we would know precisely where the electron is?
No, there is no a "precise electron" to be placed, the wave IS the electron itself. Particles are not little marbles with a defined size, particles are small excitations of an underlaying layer of reality, the quantum field without a size or position defined at the most fundamental level.
Answer: It does. But the diameter of the largest nucleus is about 15 femtometers, while the wavelength of the gamma rays emitted on positron-electron annihilation are much larger, about 2.43 picometers. The gamma ray sized electron completely surrounds the nuclueus of even the largest atoms and cannot be squeezed into the nucleus under normal heat and pressure--only at the core of a star.
@@BMRStudio very accurate observation. it used to be known as the Æther. now they have many names for it. even spooky action at a distance uses the Æther. one must think of hitting a nail on the head not whipping a rope for this to make sense. they are bean counters not scientist. i dint expect them or anyone to understand.
😂😂😂😂 No boys its the answer they can't find there is no answer you know 1+1=? But a+1=? You call a1 😂😂😂 claps for that but it is unknown may be or may not
Electrons tunnel through the nucleus all the time… but they are repelled by the down quarks. The real question is why does charge, repulsion, or attraction even exist?
Repulsion and attraction exists because of differences in density of wave field. Waves transfer energy, but they transfer energy at different rate in different configurations. When one side receives more energy at average than other - then this excess energy creates work.
It could be because the model is wrong. Maybe the 'valances' are just different stationary points on the nucleus, and the electrons just get kicked up like dust and then settle again, each in a different position that is a fixed distance away from the center of the clump. It makes more sense than magic electron valence jumping without going through the intervening space, and orbits that do not decay.
I thought the electron can't fall into the nucleus for the same reason a drunken sailor who stagers 1 step in a random direction every moment will not be infinitely close to a bar, even if the direction to the bar is bius in the random probability of her staggering. The average distance between the sailor and the bar is relative to the size of the step per moment in the simulation. If it were possible to take an infinitely small step in infinitesimal time then the drunken sailor would be infinitely close to the bar. However, Planck distance prevents this and thus electron orbits have non-zero size. Is my sense of this close to being correct or is there something I'm missing?
If you're using a toy pingpong-paddle that has an elastic band attaching the ball to the paddle, then why doesn't that elastic band pull the ball into the paddle? Because the ball and paddle are being bopped around. Same thing is happening with the electrons and the nucleus. Space at the tiny small scale is unstable, and bops around tiny objects. You and I are too big to notice it, but tiny electrons and nuclei are certainly small enough to be affected.
"Fortunately, physicists studying the real world always have the opportunity to ask the universe whether a particular hypothesis is true by conducting an experiment" What a nice way to define what experiments is...!!!
Perhaps the best one can do representing quantum mechanics in this context is to interpret the electron as a "probability cloud" or "distribution", representing the likelihood that the electron occupies a position within a certain region. Yes that seems quite abstract, but that is what it takes (in spades!) to understand quantum mechanics!
No, that's pretty much the worst you can do. It's 100% false, even though many people will tell you that. It's a very good example for why one shall not trust the majority opinion if it has been formed by mindless repetition without actual analysis.
Nice journey of discovery. I would have emphasized DeBroglie how he started with Schroedinger wave equation and adapted it to include special relativity … and thereby explained subtleties in spectral emissions which Schroedinger did not. Plus predicting antimatter (positrons) which were discovered a few years later. There are some other channels with content that goes well with yours. Physics Explained, Huygen’s Optics, are two. There’s an excellent UA-cam video of the development of Maxwell’s equations which reminds me of your narrative (people, their discoveries, how they build up to the complete current picture by Maxwell
The deeper question is "why are electrons quantized in the first place, such that they can only occupy orbitals (energy levels) at specific radii from the the nucleus?" Or, "why is the speed of light what it is, and not some faster or slower speed?" Or, "why is the value of Planck's Constant what it is, and not some value larger or smaller?". Maybe we aren't smart enough to answer those questions yet, or maybe I'm not educated enough to understand quantum mechanics. But I do love these videos, that try to bring the most extreme concepts of science to some kind of level that a layperson can grasp.
The speed of light is 1 in a rationally chosen system of units. That follows from the relativity principle, which is just an equivalent way of saying that the universe is empty. Planck's constant is also 1. The first number that is not 1 after well chosen units is the fine structure constant. It's roughly 1/137, no matter how we chose units. There are another 20 or so in our current best model of the world.
@@lepidoptera9337- I just watched a video about the Fine Structure Constant, not having much familiarity with it, and heard something that is causing a lot of concern among physicists: recent data from the Large Hadron Collider suggests that the value of the FSC may not be uniform. At extremely high energy levels, some of the proton collision fragments that the LHC generates, can only be explained if the value of the FSC at those energy levels is about 1/150, and if this is correct - that the FSC increases as energy increases, then some of the assumptions that string theory is built on may be invalid. And possibly, what we think we know about quantum mechanics, gravity, and the Standard Model may need to be re-worked to account for this. The problem is that there's only the one LHC: normally, new discoveries like this need to be repeatable by physicists in any lab anywhere in the world, but there are no other particle accelerators that come even close to being able to duplicate the energies that the LHC can pump into proton collisions.
@@laura-ann.0726 I am not convinced that "physical constants" like the fine structure constant have to be scale independent. They may also depend on cosmological time (i.e. they may have been different in the deep future than they are today) and they may vary spatially as well. None of this can be ruled out and none of it has been. There is plenty of theoretical literature that tries to elaborate the consequences of these hypotheses and that attempts to find observational data and experimental evidence for/against the constancy of these constants. That is real, hard physics. It's the questions we have to be asking and we are. The standard model is an effective field theory, i.e. it is a fit. It describes much (if not all of the data if we are adding more terms) beautifully, but it explains nothing, at least not in the sense in which quantum mechanics managed to explain e.g. the structure of the periodic table or the properties of semiconductors. Nobody denies that. String theory was/is one attempt to push past this state of half-knowledge. It did, unfortunately, not reward us with what we are looking for, at least not yet. I have my doubts that it ever will. What we know about quantum mechanics is on a slightly different level. QM is like thermodynamics or geometry. It's a framework. Neither can ever be "falsified" because none are making hard experimentally testable statements about nature. "What's the radius of an actual circle?" is not something geometry can answer, for instance. It doesn't care about real circles that are just circle-ish squiggles. In the same sense QM can't answer "What is the electron field?". For these kinds of questions we have to find actual physical evidence and then quantum mechanics tells us what other properties the electron field has to have for logical reasons but it can't say that electrons have to exist and that they have to have 511keV of rest mass energy. For that we needs "something else" and that is not part of quantum mechanics. It's a model application of it. It's one model among many possible other models that nature does not care to implement. I don't believe we are very good at teaching these sometimes subtle differences between general frameworks that can be elaborated on with mathematics and actual experimental and observational facts sufficiently, neither at the K-12 nor at the professional science level. This leads to a lot of poor mental models, even among professional physicists. I had discussions with theorists who can work quantum field theory back and forth in their sleep in which it turned out that they didn't have any idea what "a particle" actually was. That's because they never make experiments with them, so the actual physical reality of quanta of energy (they are nothing other than "clicks" in detectors) is of no importance to them. So, yeah... there are non-trivial questions here and not just a few, but usually not at the level that is in the eye of the public. It's just very hard to convey the question "QM and relativity say that U(1)xSU(2)xSU(3) is one possible model of the physical vacuum but we don't know why nature seems to prefer that over SU(8), at least below 1TeV.". To most people that's just gibberish. I admit that this is a hard science communication problem.
@@lepidoptera9337- You might be right, in that we may never be able to describe precisely what every nuance of physical reality is on every scale from Planck Length to the entirety of the Cosmos. Brian Greene says in his books on string theory, that the upper limits of the energy that an earth-based particle accelerator can achieve, are probably at least 10 orders of magnitude too small to generate proton collisions that could provide direct evidence of strings. If I understood what I was reading, we have never observed individual quarks. The forces that bind triplets of up and down quarks in protons and neutrons, are much to strong to be severed in even the most energetic collision that the LHC can produce. We see amazing showers of particles that explode outward from proton-proton collisions in the LHC, but no "naked quarks" so far. So, quarks themselves are just a theoretical model that fits observed data. Same with gluons, photons, and electrons, I guess. The Bohr Model of the atom that I became familiar with in high school isn't really correct. In some kinds of experiments, and devices like the electron gun in an old CRT television set, electrons seem to behave like little bullets that spray out from the gun, and hit phosphrus dots painted on the inside of the screen. And voila, you are watching the 7:00 o'clock news, or a movie or game show. But in other kinds of experiments, most famously the double-slit, electrons form interference bands on the screen, a behavior that can only be explained if electrons are probability waves. Electrons orbiting atomic nuclei in their respective orbital shells totally behave like fields of electric potential, and I've learned to visualize an atom as a nucleus of photons, neutrons, and gluons that are not little balls of "solid stuff" that you could poke at with a very small stick, but as a kind of "soup" of potential energy waves, where the mass of those particles is maybe just an illusion, and all that's really there is just field potentials and waves of energy flowing around at impossibly high speeds. The orbiting electrons are the maybe the same: not tiny solid balls of hard matter, but just probability waves of energy that are required by some fundamental force to only occupy specific energy states at specific distances from the nucleus. When an incoming photon, with just the right wavelength, is absorbed by one of these electrons, it might cause that electron to jump to a higher orbital for some period of time, before it re-emits that photon and falls back to it's lowest available orbital. But none of the players in this dance should be visualized as little balls of physical stuff, but as "fields" of potential. The reality of the materials that make up our human bodies, is that normal matter is something like 99.99999999% "empty space" - this being the regions of the atom between the nuclei and the inner electron orbital, and the regions between orbitals. Pick up a rock from your garden. It's likely mostly silicon dioxide, with some small amounts of other carbonate minerals and salts. Feels solid in your hand, right? But it's an illusion. What you are feeling is the resistance of the electrons in the skin covering your hand, pushing against the electrons in the minerals comprising the surface of the rock. Electric fields pushing against each other. Both your hand and the rock are almost entirely empty space if you could "see" what's actually there on a sub-atomic level. I've tried to explain this to my friends, and most of them can't picture it any better than I can. I'm just a person who has read a lot and not a professional scientist of any kind. Do Brian Greene, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Don Lincoln, or any of the other scientists who try to make their world at least slightly comprehensible to us laypeople, really comprehend on a gut level, these ultimate mysteries? Brian Greene says himself that it's likely that string theory might never be "provable" in the ways that the physicists of the early 20th century proved the science that led to nuclear fission, digital computers, light-emitting diodes, lasers, and mag-lev high speed trains. He said, "Strings, if they exist in reality, are probably going to be so small that we will never be able to detect them with any device that humans could build. They will forever be only a theoretical model that does, or does not, fit observed data".
@@laura-ann.0726 "If I understood what I was reading, we have never observed individual quarks." I think that depends on what we want to call "observation". We have scattering diagrams that show how electrons "bounce off protons". When plotted in a certain way they show a three-fold symmetry. Am I looking at the equivalent of a photo of three quarks there the way I would be looking at the two eyes, mouth and nose of a person who is standing in the sunlight in front of me? What's the fundamental difference between the two "observations", other than that they require different "cameras" and that my body happens to have a built in detector for the scattering of 1.5eV photons but not for 100GeV electrons? I think to a certain extent it is a matter of personal choice what we want to call reality here. To me that scattering diagram is perfectly "real" and it is a perfectly meaningful projection of "what's inside a proton". That there are phenomena that can't be separated without losing their meaning or becoming something completely different is also not restricted to the microscopic world. The poles of a magnet can not be separated, already. If we cut a magnet in half we get two magnets, each with two new poles. Same with a proton. If we "take it apart" we get either new nucleons or unstable quark-anti-quark states. Is that all that different from a macroscopic magnet? Both phenomena are a direct mathematical consequence or relativity. Nature can't avoid them. To me the latter insight far outweighs the conceptual question of "What is a quark?". "But in other kinds of experiments, most famously the double-slit, electrons form interference bands on the screen, a behavior that can only be explained if electrons are probability waves." That, unfortunately, is one of the worst PR disasters of physics and Richard Feynman may be responsible for it. It's a completely false explanation of quantum phenomena. Quanta are amounts of energy. What we are detecting in "the double slit" is NOT the behavior of things. It's the microscopic behavior of energy. That's the reason why it does not matter if we are doing scattering experiments with photons, electrons, neutrons, helium atoms or Buckyballs. That's why it wouldn't matter if we could do it with golf balls. Energy always behaves the same, no matter what kind of system is exchanging it. "...where the mass of those particles is maybe just an illusion..." It's no more an illusion than energy, momentum and angular momentum. It's just a system property. At the end of the day physics is all about properties. It's not about objects. One could teach that really early with suitable examples (as early as kindergarten, in my opinion) and then the transition from object to property based thinking that is required in modern physics would be much easier for most people. We are simply stuck in the materialist mindset of the 19th century in our K-12 education. We are testing the living daylights out of our kids with problems like "A car rolls down a 15 degree incline. Calculate the normal force that the car exerts on the surface." that suggest that the words "car" and "incline" have some deep meaning, so everybody learns to think that physics is all about rolling and gliding and flying objects. It isn't. It's about the exchange of energy, momentum, angular momentum and charges between systems. We should teach THAT first, because thinking in systems is a general "divide and conquer" strategy that is useful outside of physics.
I think it's really funny how the deeper we look we see that everything is revolving around something No matter how strong it is it pulls toward something bigger Yet it wants it's space
Question is where did all the electrons come from. Curious that every proton has a corresponding electron. Why are there exactly enough electrons and no extras ?
Sometimes there are some extra electrons, but then the atom is not neutral any more, becoming a negative ion. Or if it lacks some electrons, a positive ion. The salt in your kitchen consists of positive sodium ions and negative chlorine ions, which each "stole" an elctron from a sodium atom.
That's the leptogenesis problem. There should have been equal numbers of electrons and positrons in the early universe and equal numbers of quarks and anti-quarks. There weren't. Electrons "won" a slight majority and because of charge conservation (which is most likely absolute), that process had to create protons as well.
My definitive guess is that disallowed electrons actually do fall into the nucleus, and they do fly in and out of orbits in every possible way. However, all "disallowed" states decohere from the "classical measuring apparatus" (the observer). Therefore-ish, all we can ever observe are the electrons that remain in their quantum orbits. IOW, the observer is the sustainer of the electrons' quantum orbits because the observer is also quantum and can only see the electrons that are in coherence with the state of the observer. (Wha?)
The reason is similar to why satellite's in a geostationary orbit do not fall out of orbit. On those stationary orbits, the forces neutralize and cancel or balance each other out, but outside of those orbits the forces are not in equilibrium. But system's whose state of equilibrium is disrupted or disturbed will always tend to revert back to a state of equilibrium, from their state of non-equilibrium. The natural tendency is always to restore balance or equilibrium. This is the principle way in which energy is conserved. This is the law of entropy. By rights, entropy should always be a measure of order in a system, not it's disorder.
It's because they are not particles when you consider them bound. They are standing waves. Of something. We can describe the something but have no idea what it is.
Electrons do not orbit but fit into defined locations like plasma tufts, defined by charge points on the nucleus. The Bohr model is a red herring. Electrons do not orbit unless there is an input energy large enough to break the electron out of its position around the nucleus. Electrons and protons are condensers of the ether medium. Quantum computing experiments show that there is an electro-magnetic ether shell around all atoms, electrons and protons that can be controlled as a 'qubit' by an electric field or laser. It is the ether shell discovered by quantum computing experiments around the electrons and protons that provides the needed tension and keeps the electron out of the nucleus. The ether, AKA the Dirac ether, is dipole particles or photons that engage in flux cancellation around the atom to neutralize the Coulomb forces within.
Newtonian mechanics just doesn't work at that dimension because it does not account for physical principles which apply only at atomic dimensions. It is an error to expect that macroscopic phenomena would scale down to an arbitrary degree.
All electrons travel in a straight-line past atom but are drawn back towards atomic orbitals by the negative positive asymmetrical oscillations of color charge.
Emerging energetic actors indirectly detected are amazing but to scale of atoms the fact anything and everything it can ever be that is definable is absolutely amazing 👏
Actually, the wavelength of a tennis ball is zero. Experiments have shown (and I forget the source) that anything larger than the planck mass has a wavelength of zero.
@@TerraPhysica That a neutron star is a dense package of fermions is yet another poor mental picture. We simply don't know what the spectrum of the standard model looks like at these densities. We can't do the necessary quantum-chromodynamics calculations, yet. I wouldn't be surprised to find that neutron star matter is capable of a very rich SU(3) chemistry, in the same way that ordinary matter can do very rich U(1) chemistry.
After watching this, I have one question: Why don't electrons fall onto the nucleus?
See my comment. The terms of the question and the totally misleading images are seriously flawed.
Concepts that are close enough in the everyday world are not “close enough” at the sub-atomic level.
Same reason planets don't fall into the Sun.
Electrons and protons don't merge despite being attracted towards each other is because there's a small hill between them. You can push both to the top of the hill by expending energy and in the classical world, they'd stay there but in the quantum world, particles are always jiggling/moving. So they're more likely to be at the bottom of the hill than the top.
As for why the hill exists, I guess that's just how quantum fields are structured? There isn't really a good answer to that. Kinda like asking why the electron has a negative charge. It just does
😂😂😂😂
Despite my frivolous comment a month ago, the reason is that electrons are not little particles or balls of matter, they have significant energy even at absolute zero, and normally they do not interact with protons. However, it does sometimes happen that an electron is captured by a proton in the nucleus and converted into a neutron,. This happens about 10% of the time during the radioactive decay ofpotassium-40 (about 0.1% of all potassium) when the K-40 is converted to Ar-40 with the emission of a gamma ray. The other 90% of K-40 decays by emitting a beta ray (fast electron) to become Ca-40.
I don't find it satisfying that the electron cannot fall into the nucleus due to an "uncertainty principle". In fact much of quantum mechanics fails to be explanatory even though it is rather precisely descriptive (but only of probabilities rather than individual events). Some suppose that our "brains just aren't built to understand it" or "the quantum world is so unlike the classical world that it surpasses understanding". Maybe we actually have more to learn about the quantum world. That we can accurately calculate probabilities of events is all well and good, but we lack insight into what is actually going on.
Could QCD play a role in it? If I understand correctly, UUD(ignore UDD as it has no charge) is always moving due to QCD and the color charges. I have to wonder if that and residual strong force from nuclear gluons have a hand in it.
It's the wrong explanation to boot. The stability of atoms is due to lepton number conservation and the mass difference between neutron and proton. The interactions with most nuclei can simply not destroy an electron state. These atoms in their ground state are the lowest stable quantum mechanical state of the quarks/gluons in the nucleus and the electrons. If we put enough external pressure on (or we have an oversupply of protons), then electrons can "fall" into the nucleus because now one additional neutron is the energetically lowest state rather than proton plus electron. That's what a neutron star is made of and that's how electron capture works in certain types of nuclear reactions. This is an endothermic reaction, though, so it requires a large external energy supply, which comes from gravity in case of the neutron star and the electromagnetic force in case of those extra protons.
Well, the thing is, science doesn't promise to "explain." Only to "describe" / "predict." In a lot of cases, especially the ones we learn in high school, you can get an "explanation" of a phenomenon in terms of "lower level" phenomena, and we're often very comfortable accepting those lower level phenomena because we've heard about them our whole lives. But ultimately any theory will reach a "foundational layer" where you have a set of assumptions that just have to be accepted, much like the postulates of geometry. The theory never "explains" these first starting principles. When those assumptions are intuitive, you're fine - it doesn't bother you. When they're not, that's when you get stressed out over it. But nature doesn't really care about your stress level. The uncertainty principle is a fundamental principle of nature that appears in quantum theory as an assumption. Usually it's wired into the theory by specifying that the commutator of conjugate variables is non-zero. This is specified basically as a postulate. So yes, I see how that can be "unsatisfying." But there's not a lot that can be done about it. It's part of what's required in order for the theory to make correct predictions, but we "got it" just by observing the world and recognizing that it's never violated. It's also the reason, primarily, that the precise deterministic physics we learned in high school is only approximate. In our day-to-day world we usually can't SEE the uncertainty, but it's there down in the noise.
Sorry - I didn't really mean to firehose you like that. But this is fundamental and the only way to cope with it is just to acknowledge that this is in fact how the world works.
You might like this paper:
arxiv.org/abs/1810.06981
It basically derives most of physics from one single starting assumption: that at least one conserved quantity must exist in nature. It offers no real PROOF that such a conserved quantity must exist - that's the starting assumption you just have to accept. But once you have that it does a good job of pulling the laws of physics out of the math. It even shows that you don't have to assume the existence of space to start with - it will "show up" on its own as a math consequence of that assumption.
@@KipIngram Physics explains complex phenomena in terms of simple phenomena. We don't teach that sufficiently in schools. There are no proofs in physics and nobody ever said that there would be. Neither does physics start from axioms. Those concepts are reserved for mathematics. You are confused at the level of basic categories.
@@lepidoptera9337 Physics can be divided between experimental physics and theoretical physics, the first one yes its based on empiric evidence and mostly tries to get the rules in order to predict some phenomena, but the second one tries to build a theoretical model in order to not only make predictions, but gain more fundamental understanding, and this second one is the one that does use assumptions to make a model. This part of physics that tries to explain some phenomena does not need simple phenomena in order to explain it, a model can be build with assumptions.
In conclusion, axioms and assumptions are used in Physics, but you are right in the part where you say you can't tecnically proof any physical phenomena with 100% certainty that it will always hold true, but that goes more into the philosophy of science than physics itself.
Aside from the video primarily discussing atoms using “old quantum theory only”, at the end, it fails to recognize that for the ground state, the highest probable place for the electron is indeed inside the nucleus (when the probability distribution is written in Cartesian coordinates in 3d). In fact, the electron often spends substantial time within the nucleus. It does not interact or change anything there due to energy considerations--there is not enough energy for a proton and electron to combine to make a neutron--except in special nuclei, where the electron is captured by the nucleus and a proton and electron combine to make a neutron. The reverse process, of creating an electron in the nucleus, does occur in tritium, which can beta decay to He3. If one uses a relativistic formula, the probability distribution within the nucleus is even higher, because the wavefunction actually diverges at the origin. And, of course, zero angular momentum states are possible in an atom. This is one of the old quantum ideas that was incorrect.
when we are talking about electrons and atoms, we mostly talk about stationary state. You might remember that we even consider ψ do not depend on time , so dψ/dt=0, when solwing Shrodinger equation for hydrogen atom. All that stuff with electron capture or beta-decay are not a case.
@@TerraPhysica Of course it is. The electron has a nonzero probability to be inside the nucleus. When energetically favorable, it will eventually undergo the transition. This happens from the ground state. There is no excitation needed to make it occur. It is just a question of whether it is energetically allowed. For stable nuclei, it is not, for unstable, it is. One simply waits long enough and it will occur. It is just one cannot predict precisely when it will occur, just when it will occur on average.
quantum4everyone is correct. By your line of reasoning, electron capture could never occur. Yet, it does. Sure, the Heisenberg effects reduce the probability that the nucleus will capture an electron, but the more important issue is that the neutron and neutrino created by the electron being captured has more mass than the original electron-proton pair. For electron capture processes, there is typically more protons in the nucleus than normal, making it energetically easier for the proton to be separated from the other neutrons there.
When a presentation starts with little spheres whizzing around a similarly wrong nucleolus, you know it's not going to end well.
verbose and irrelevant. just think QHP
Just happened upon this channel a few hours ago and just started from the beginning and it has been enjoyable thus far.
There are a lot of interesting details and perspectives in this video that I never saw in other youtube videos about these concepts.
I don't see how Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which is a mathematical construct, explains the reality of which force or forces prevent an electron orbit from touching the nucleus.
You are correct. It's the wrong explanation.
Ahh! It's not just a mathematical construct; it actually describes what happens. If an electron fell into the nucleus you would know its position and momentum with a greater precision than the principle allows. Therfore it cannot happen. Remember that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle describes reality.
@@pershoremathsandsciencestu9445 An electron-positron pair (positronium) is subject to the same uncertainty and it will annihilate in approx. 100ns (ground state) and live on the order of microseconds if it's decaying from some of the higher states. So, no, uncertainty has absolutely nothing to do with the stability of atoms.
@@pershoremathsandsciencestu9445 Not true, the time dependent relativistic Schrödinger equation does have the electron going through the nucleus part of the time, it does happen. Not a problem since the electron isn't a wave, only it's properties are probability waves, the electron is a point by our best theory as are the quarks in the nucleus.
@@lepidoptera9337 Do the e- and the e+ have to have the same momentum to annihilate (participate in a Feynman diagram)?
Here are the three things I have to praise about your presentation! 1st) The Chronology! Thank you for laying out the investigations and question leading up to these discoveries in such a simple and detailed manner. Often, videos discuss ideas independent of the many experiments and considerations that led up to those investigations! 2nd) Thank you for keeping it politically free! It's like when we think 'atom' we have to be told about Einstein's 1905 paper with Brownian motion! But as you have here indicated, as far back as 1897, there were already considerations on the atomic structure of matter. Ludwig Boltzmann also stands out as a figure of importance. The issue as to why it took so long for it to become acceptable is it mattered too much who was the one telling you this as a matter of 'politics!' And finally, 3rd) the transition between the ideas and the illustrations shown. It is indeed impossible to absolutely visualize an atom, but the illustrations you used really help because of the wide variety you used. Please keep up the good work!
Whished they teach like this
See my comment. The question is based on flawed conceptions.
Not that I don't value your opinions, just that these flawed concepts you speak of have led to the bearing of SOME fruits, such as the computer and internet through which you are posing these very ideas of yours, yes? In that way, conceptualization of abstract concepts, flawed or otherwise, do help us to get SOME progress in math through the imagining and reimagining of these models. After all, our reality is still formed from these invisible things and in that way they express themselves in some fashion or other and considering them in the same way we do the macro world pulls out these 'expressions' even if not their identities much less their definitions. But guess what? That's fine! We don't need to perfectly understand everything to enjoy some of the practical applications, like you know for example, airplanes? or my iPad? or x-rays, CAT scans...@@johnmalcolm4822
You still need a job.
A very complicated non-answer to a simple question. Very often physics amateurs will try to answer a conceptual question with math because they don't truly understand the concepts. We have that here. Further, the math mistake is substituting momentum p in an equation for the UNCERTAINTY in momentum (delta p). The statement delta p= p itself is wrong. So the solution doesn't even answer the question mathematically because it is nonsensical.
19:00 there is no orbit radius of electrons around the nucleus, there is a probability density function. the science in this video was current about 1920, before quantum physics.
Exactly. I was about to right same. It's one of the first thinvs we learned in QP.
Why???
We are already at 13:25, and the graphics artist is still depicting an electron revolving around the nucleus if an atom, but we already know this model is incorrect.
Also, the presenter already told us that charged accelerating particles emit radiation, so why is the graphics artist still showing us a misleading, incorrect view of the concepts that the narrator is trying to to teach.
When the graphics don't match the words, it's damn confusing vvi think this team needs to go back to square 1 and think about more carefully how to explain these concepts.
I’m more interested in a similar yet different question:
If I am an electron how would I differentiate a proton from a positron? How is it that when it’s a positive charge just 1000 bigger than its own mass it can’t annihilate?
"If I am an electron how would I differentiate a proton from a positron" They have different masses, so you definitely would. By the way, there are atom-like structures formed of electron and positron. But positrons cannot form nucleus, because they don't participate in strong nuclear interaction, i.e. don't feel forces of attraction that compensate electric repulsion between them.
@@TerraPhysicacommon center of mass is the first step for the classical solution ( you may have heard of Sir Isaac Newton ).
the electron is a point particle, a proton is 3 point particles (quarks) with charges in multiples of 1/3. An electron can't annihilate one of those, conservation of charge won't allow that.
@@RWZiggy is there an animation about what happens with charge in beta decay?
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt There are videos about beta decay and a related cool thing called electron capture here on youtube... but none have good animation, lolz. Anyway, still worth learning about so type them both together n search as single line
I was hoping for an explanation that would use the tools of classical physics, as my high school students usually melt when quantum mechanics is invoked. The big dilemma for me is to explain why the attraction of opposite charges (which is a dominant concept in high school chemistry) does not take precedence over all other considerations...
That's the whole point. Classical physics can't explain it.
Well, the problem is that this is just not a classical phenomenon. The best way to arrive at the answer is to treat the nucleus as a stationary (because it's very massive) central positive charge, and solve Schrodinger's equation in that context. Demand that the solutions have the necessary continuity / smoothness, and what falls out is the standard spherical harmonics for the orbitals we learn about in chemistry. That completely defines the thing. Usually we do this with just a single electron (thus ignoring any other electrons that might be in the atom) so it's really "most right" for hydrogen. But neglecting the other electrons isn't "awful" - we can still learn a lot and in fact we can basically "derive the periodic table."
This is one of the nicest examples of very simple physical concepts producing a "large result" (more or less all of chemistry). Another similar example (that you can approach with classical physics, though quantum is still more ideal) is the way Newton's laws of motion applied to molecules of a gas in a statistical way give rise to all of the normal large scale gas laws (Boyle's, Charles's, ideal gas law, etc.) and also the Boltzmann distribution for molecular speeds in equilibrium as a function of temperature. Beautiful stuff.
One of the reasons we went and did quantum theory in the first place, though, was that classical theory was incapable of solving certain problems - atomic structure is one of them. Blackbody radiation spectrum is another.
therein lies your problem. The attraction / repulsion of charges is in fact responsible for all considerations. Modern interpretation based off Victorian assumptions refuses to allow this.
on Wikipedia look up 'correspondence principle'. then find 'Generalized correspondence principle'
Essentially classical physics is a special case of quantum mechanics. Nature is much deeper than our idea of it.
For the kids try this... the center of the electron's charge distribution over space does actually fall on the nucleus.
The minimum distribution (radius) is larger than the nucleus because the electron wavelength is much longer than that of the nucleus. In fact inside neutron stars the pressure is enough to collapse an electron and a proton into a new neutron.
@@sonpopco-op9682 Well, "many" considerations, but not all. Electromagnetism explains a LOT. But it doesn't explain gravity and it doesn't explain how the atomic nuclei hold together. That's why we have for forces in nature instead only two - if electromagnetism could do it all, we wouldn't need the other three.
I was hoping for an answer that included the modeling we used to describe the conditions where the exclusion and uncertainty principles are overcome. I think that understanding that would give people a much better answer than just this, it is missing pieces.
The pronounciation is "debroy" not "debrouglie". I realize it's an automated voice, but it just follows the trend of actual science communicators butchering that name almost every time.
I feel like only PBS Spacetime has gotten it right, maybe a few others.
Edit: I also have to admit, it's really hard for me to focus and take in the information with the incredibly monotone cg voice.
Anyway, 'nough nitpicking, thank you for the otherwise great video :)
At 0:58 you discuss how Joseph Thompson discovered the electron. That discussion occurs over a picture of Ernest Rutherford not J. J. Thompson. A picture of Thompson can be found here - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._J._Thomson. Rutherford is pictured again at 1:39.
You should have shown what the modern electron orbitals look like. The orbitals do show some electrons spending time inside the nucleus. They don't remain there, but they do get there.
Which means we need a good explanation for why they don’t (usually) do funny stuff with the protons.
@@peterfireflylundIt seems electrons only get captured by protons while inside neutron stars. Other times, they're flying in and out and no one is being captured.
Actually, "matter waves" went out in the 1930s, the only waves are probabilities. The electron is a point particle with no size, so are the quarks. The electron does go through the nucleus, the equations of quantum mechanics say it does. By the way there are certain conditions under which the electron can be captured by the nucleus and cause changes there.
Can yo explain? please
A correction: The units of Planck's constant (16:21) are joules _times_ second, not joules _per_ second.
And I was dismayed to learn in college that "de Broglie" is pronounced "de broy" but then confirmed that we Americans may pronounce it as it is spelled in our orthography.
You *_can_* pronounce it any way you like. But that won't make it right. The way to pronounce names is as they are pronounced in the language if you have that capability (eg if you can't pronounce the San or Xhosa clicks - don't). However, given that Americans pronounce route as "rowt" rather than the very easy "root" - you lot can't be helped.......
Is electron capture the reason we believe electrons are a combination of corpuscular and waveform at all, rather than pure waveforms?
You believe that? What's that religion called? ;-)
Because they're not really particles orbiting like planets around the sun. They are fluctuations in one of a number of quantum fields which coexist and span the universe.
De Broi is the pronunciation you seek. Very nice compact piece. Thx.
As far as i know, english spikers pronounce it like that. My native language is russian, and we pronounce it as "de broil", and that is how his name was pronounces in his native french. But I think I must use the pronounciation that is more habitual for english-spaeking listeners, if i make videos in english
In French, his name is pronouned as "de breuil".
@@TerraPhysica but it is _wrong_
@@TerraPhysicaI agree. English spikers talk funny. His name is pronounces that way in his native french.
Добрый день.
@@eeshtarr stem+language background of mine tells me: yes, it’s wrong. But a lot of foreign words are said wrong in other languages, INCLUDING proper nouns, for a number of reason, albeit, at times, rather hilarious ones. On top, there’s no norm for some of them, “say what you think it should sound like” kinda approach. So, just relax. 😊
Even though a proton and electron are attracted to each other, the electron is too shy and fearful to actually approach. So it hangs around the proton it loves, doing it's best to repel any other electrons that would want to get close.
That makes more sense than 'dark certainty'!
Every high school student can remember this touching story. Thanks!
Given the comments, you should have left two things out and emphasized what you brought up in the last 90 seconds.
1. Eliminate the n=0 discussion. It's confusing and doesn't drive the narrative. 2. Too much time spent on Bohr and DeBroglie. I've never seen a decent presentation of DeBroglie 1-D waves fitting into circular orbits. I told my students to skip over that part, and go straight to ... 3. Schrodinger and orbitals. That would also help respond to some comments below: yes electrons Do have a probability of being at the nucleus - specifically, s electrons, but not p, d, or f electrons. What are those? I was hoping this video would address that, but no such luck. Wait until next lecture.
Yes - how come the video doesn't mention Schrodinger equations and orbitals?
they do fall onto/into the nucleus, we then call the system a 'neutron'.. in neutron stars that's all you have, electrons pushed into the single proton nucleus hence neutral charge.. this also allows for higher density.. the pressure also prevents them from decaying, unlike under earthly conditions where free neutrons decay in 15 minutes.. you also have some neutrino interaction in the process
"in neutron stars that's all you have, electrons pushed into the single proton nucleus hence neutral charge.." Here we talk about steady states of electrons, it's not quite a case
Doesn't this simply beg the question, what is the uncertainty of the proton being in the nucleus of the atom? If we fired a line of protons in a vacuum at two slits wouldn't we also observe such uncertainty. If both are uncertain then we are back with the plum-pudding model just with an asterisk? Perhaps because protons and neutrons are composites of quarks they are less uncertain?
If somehow you were to have a concentration of electrons and neutrons in one place, would protons fall into such probability shells?
While math is a powerful tool, faulty assumptions will produce faulty answers, one model may have many mathematical solutions. I understand that this is beyond our scope of sight, and is relatively new physics. I just wonder with how convoluted and pointing to math some answers are, how questioned the assumptions inherent were, and how explored all solutions to the equations have been. Sometimes a mistake in Sudoku may not become apparent until much later down the line, then it becomes very difficult to figure out where the faulty assumption was made.
16:10 momentum is measured in kilogram metres per second, NOT kilograms per metre per second
Electron capture:
Electron capture (K-electron capture, also K-capture, or L-electron capture, L-capture) is a process in which the proton-rich nucleus of an electrically neutral atom absorbs an inner atomic electron, usually from the K or L electron shells. This process thereby changes a nuclear proton to a neutron and simultaneously causes the emission of an electron neutrino.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_capture
I did not understand your answer for the question why electron dont fall onto nucleus. 19:45 seems to get there but confusing
Allow me to ask an absoulte amateur's question: Aren't the electrons in a Neutron star "pressed" into the Protons, so that only Neutrons result? At least this is what I've often read about neutron stars. But if this is true, then it IS possible for n to be zero, no matter how you mathematically proved it to be impossible. Can you enlighten me there?
"Aren't the electrons in a Neutron star "pressed" into the Protons, so that only Neutrons result?" They are not in stady state in that case
@@TerraPhysica That's nonsense, yet, again.
It seems that one way to describe a neutron is to view it as a hydrogen atom where the electron is in the "zeroth" orbital. Now what happens to Heisenberg?
Your grasp of English grammar is impressive
He is proved wrong! The difference between a proton and neutron is just a quark change; that doesn't reconcile with a neutron being a proton+electron...
Glade i came across this channel very interesting question, nice visuals n audio.
What about making neutron stars? If you push an electron into the nucleus it will turn protons into neutrons.
that's not a stationary state
@@TerraPhysica Dude. Stop talking nonsense. Everything you said in your video is factually incorrect. No need to make it worse.
So many words to say "we don't know"
Every "why?" rabbit hole ends with "we don't know, it is the way it is". Deepening that rabbit hole is the only thing science attempts to do and does (I am NOT saying that this is bad, it is just a fact). In my opinion, you can never answer every "why?" question because there will always be unknown information. Even if you think you know everything, there will always be questions you don't know you could even ask or haven't imagined at all. Answering a question is only possible after you ask it.
My reaction on seeing the title.
It's simply a fact that they don't, just as it's a fact that the speed of light is a constant. Asking 'why' presupposes a reason, in other words an intention. I tend to shy away from suggestions that there is any sort of intent behind the universe because there are far too many people willing to tell you what that is.
And that's not many words to say you don't understand, because we actually do know. I have no idea what you're referring to, that we don't know.
@@qwadratix previously, equations for magnetic and electric force were separate and just 'facts', but later people found out a single formula for it. Previously, there were separate equations for gravity on Earth and for stellar objects, but later people found a more fundamental single law behind both.
Asking 'why' is attempting to find that more fundamental reason. E.g. to derive C from other constants. Why does C and other free parameters have the value that they have? Don't you suspect that at least some of them will be derived from other values?
What if people of the old had this approach? "Why does electric force look so similar to magnetic force? It just does". "Why does silver tarnish? It just does".
That's his job
If he didn't want comments they would be turned off
Thankyou very much for your video
The experimentally observed fall of an inner electron ( a 1s electron orbits on the K orbit, an old term) into a neutron deficient nucleus is called K capture, K-Einfang in German. Hence an electron spends some time IN the nucleus before being irreversibly absorbed by a proton. This somewhat contradicts your assertions. The French pronounciation of de Broglie cannot be rendered in English, the last sound is the same as in Italian Cagliostro, Cagliari , as in Spanish calle and as in Portuguese Calvelhe.
A great, high level explanation on what is happening between electrons and the nucleus of an atom. Too bad we still don't have an explanation as to why it has to be that way.
This question was answered by George Goedecke in 1964 when he discovered the non-radiation condition which had been hidden in Maxwells equations for 100 years. He discovered that non radiation occurs when the radius of the atomic electron equals ncT/2pi where n is normalized by the fine structure constant. This equation gives the r to be the Bohr radius , or .53 times 10 to the minus 10. That is the true size of the atomic electron.
Wow 😮
How do you deal with these comments?
Such patience and tolerance!
Bravo!
I'm a former school teacher. I've had to get used to it)
@@TerraPhysica yes, but your question is technically nonsense. Protium is what happens when an electron falls on to a nucleus. It makes a stable atom.
I think you meant to ask "why don't all electrons fall into all the protons and just make neutrons everywhere?'". That's a better question, and doing some research you will find that neutrons that aren't in neutron star have a halflife of about 10 minutes.
So then your answer changes up a bit... Electrons can fall into protons, but electrons behave with strange quantum rules. We can't always be sure if where these things actually are, and electrons have some wave like properties. A formula that seems to work is called the Schrodinger's Equation. The electron and protons create a system that has apparent structure because the bound state of the electrons around positve potential wells... It gets complicated fast.
@@kayakMike1000 Electrons are quanta of energy. We teach this at the high school level for photons. The definition of a quantum of energy doesn't change just because it has charge and rest mass.
@@TerraPhysicaI for one found your video entertaining and educational. I learnt a few things and liked how you repeated and reworded some points in case the viewer didn’t catch them the first time. There will always be people who want to gatekeep knowledge and spread their ego through comment sections, I hope it doesn’t dissuade you
@@ShaneH42 Fortunately there will also always be people who want to correct mistakes in science videos on UA-cam. Students will watch these videos to help them learn these topics - it is very important that misconceptions don't spread through sloppy YouTubing. Electrons absolutely can enter the nucleus, and to say the can't is not merely simplifying a complex topic, it is just plain wrong.
I thought DeBroglie said an Electron is a standing wave, any thoughts?
where you mention JJ and the electron you show Rutherford
The electrons do NOT flow IN the wire. They just vibrate OUTSIDE the wire. What did Heaviside say? What does Eric Dollard say? How did Tesla create devices that drew energy directly from the earth?
electrons do flow inside wire...post PHD E.E.....they can flow outside wires if they chose to, wires are "optional"
I'd say when an electron falls onto a proton you have an atom.
In short, what we see IS an electron as close as it can get to a proton, ground state.
What I mean is, an electron free of a proton can be either wave or particle in behavior. But, once falling onto a proton it is just a fuzzy wave, close as it can get like that.
Technically, electrons _do_ fall on the positively charged nucleus. These are called "atoms" and they are often found electrically neutral. There's a _better_ question to ask, like... Why does there seem to be a structural relationship between positve nuclei and the electrons? I think the idea of electron orbits like planets orbiting a star caused the confusion. Subatomic paricles behave like waves, electrons are no exception. The wave like nature of the electron exists on top of the nuclei.
I think what they meant by falling onto the nucleus was that the radius would be 0, as that's what they said in the video.
@@GIRGHGH well, you fall until you cant anymore because something else stops that attractive force. Electrons fall into the nucleus until something stops them from falling, the attractive force between the electrons and the protons is satisfied. The electron, being a subatomic particle... Well, it exists as a wave as well as a particle. It's bound to the nucleus through electrostatic forces... But the tricky thing is... Electron wave-like nature makes it much more likely to stand out from the nucleus, it's not that it's really orbiting, it's that you don't really know where it is. In the simplest case, you could have a neutron, but strangely the electron here will escape in a decay event. Then you have hydrogen 1, which is a lower energy than a neutron. The electron fell to the ground state, which is a probability of finding the electron near by the proton but most likely within 1 radius of hydrogen.
Enjoyed the your presentation and even more by some smart comments. Liked and Subscribed.👍❤
ok so when we push an object, the electrons push or pull the objects protons ?
Yep. They also push the electrons of neighbouring atoms. Electrons are quite promiscuous. Their behaviour of weaving themselves according to the uncertainty principle even extends to weaving with electrons around other atoms, and that’s how atoms get stuck together in covalent bonds, such as is found in metals and ceramics. They also stick atoms together when atoms have more or less electrons than protons - in this case, the protons’ positive charge leaks out and attracts the electrons of neighbouring atoms, creating ionic bonding such as is found in salts. In this case though, the bond lengths are longer and there is no sharing of orbitals, and that’s why ionic bonds are so weak compared to covalent ones.
“The Final Theory: Rethinking Our Scientific Legacy “, Mark McCutcheon for proper physics.
hi thanks for the reply ,yes oxidation and reduction is very interesting but i was referring to the objects protons in relation with their electrons ,when we push an object or hit it our electrons touch the objects electrons and transfer the kinetic energy to that point and then that energy will be transfered to the rest of the object ,so when a proton of that object moves its because it follows i think the electron it is attached @@simontillson482
@@davidrandell2224 Take your nonsense elsewhere, please. He’s a total crackpot.
I just thought of this. Electrons and protons don't merge despite being attracted towards each other is because there's a small hill between them. You can push both to the top of the hill by expending energy and in the classical world, they'd stay there but in the quantum world, particles are always jiggling/moving. So they're more likely to be at the bottom of the hill than the top.
As for why the hill exists, I guess that's just how quantum fields are structured? There isn't really a good answer to that. Kinda like asking why the electron has a negative charge. It just does 🤷
the 'hill' is called the nuclear force.
Shouldn't there be a scalar potential where the colomb forces cancel out?
As per Maxwell's laws.
@@rogerjohnson2562 That's kind of what I was implying lol
5:28 Could you give me link or video name where you describe this mechanism?
The video explains that quantum model is better than planetary one, because in planetary one it's not explained how electrons not slow down and fall on to the atom due to always right maxwells laws which tells accelerating electrons will emit light and lose kinetic energy. But in quantum model it's still not answered, only difference is that there are more rules from which fixed orbitals are emerged, it still doesn't answer why electrons don't loos energy due to emitting radiation. What do I miss ? I am totally not physicist forgive me if my question is stupid.
does this still apply when the electron is not in orbit around a proton? if you increase pressure enough such that another proton enters its neighbour's electron cloud, does the electron start making weird orbits or are you by that time call it nuclear fusion?
"if you increase pressure enough such that another proton enters its neighbour's electron cloud, does the electron start making weird orbits or are you by that time call it nuclear fusion?" in this case electron will be consumed by a proton, and we will get a neutron. This is called electron capture (i hope i translate the term correctly)
I think atoms can give or take smaller amounts of energy to move up down their electrons in orbits; but when it comes to merge electrons and the nucleus it needs larger amounts of gravity pressure and temperature (energy) such as the one the star can do at its end phase. So to move from n=1 to n=0 it requires a lot of energy.
We have no reason to believe that an electron cannot pass completely through the 'positive' nucleus unaffected. It is simply the ignorance of what "charges" actually are, that even raises this question.
Charges are properties that are conserved under the Poincare group, which is the symmetry of the physical vacuum. We know all of this and have for more than half a century. Probably closer to a full human lifetime. It's just not something we teach at the high school level, yet. Eventually we will. This isn't rocket science. It's more like chemistry in a sense.
Why doesnt the Earth fall into the sun?
@@RoastPostIt's moving too fast in the wrong direction. Next question.
@@sonpopco-op9682 Wrong answer. Over the very long run the Earth would fall into the sun. You guys simply don't understand physics. ;-)
@@lepidoptera9337incorrect. You dont understand observations. Orbital distances increase with time; you failed physics.
Why electrons don't slow down and stop spinning altogether? Why they don't experience friction of the atmosphere?
What happens when neutron stars are formed? Don’t the electrons get forced into the nuclei of atoms in that case?
They do! Thats why they’re so energetic & angry, that’s fusion creates insane energy
@@jackebinger5144 I wish we could capture that energy here on Earth in some kind of a reactor. Maybe quantum tunneling would help like it does with fusion in stars.
That's different. Electrons in an atom do partially exist inside the nucleus but don't interact with protons in that way.
Pauli exclusion principal should be included
Pauli and his exclusion principal is most of the reason why we can't run through walls and merge objects together by squeezing really hard...
@@starventure we have atoms or chemistry because of exclusion principle. Otherwise we would not have molecules.
@@sdal4926 Imagine what would happen if the Pauli Exclusion principle was suddenly suspended throughout the entire universe...my guess is that all of everything would suddenly collapse into a quark singularity.
Yes but protons and electrons are not the same particles, therefore the Pauli’s exclusion doesn’t apply? I’m not sure but Pauli’s exclusion is a simplification of more complex explanation that uses the assumption that you deal with 2 (or more) similar particles. So it explains why every electrons doesn’t fall in the ground state, but not why the ground state is not n=0. Correct me if I’m missing something :)
@@starventure I suspect every structure to disintegrate but not into a singularity. Just a same size universe where what matter exists is in a form we can't understand.
Nice discussion. I like to teach my students that classical physics proves that atoms can't exist (electrons would radiate away their energy according to the L'armor formula ) Since atoms do exist, classical physics must be wrong. The only flaw in your video I find at 20:00 when you show the 'electron cloud' as an apparent ring, and then state we cannot visualize the shape of such clouds. Indeed we can. Just look up s- and p- orbitals in a chemistry book. They are the solutions to the 3D Schroedinger equation.
Saying something doesn’t behave physically because of an abstract principle is not an acceptable physical explanation. But it is all we have. “Faith is the essence of things unseen” is an abstract principle that enables theological belief. “You cannot measure the position and momentum of an object” is an abstract principle that enables quantum mechanics. In both cases no acceptable physical explanation is forthcoming. It is the ultimate in frustration.
I am very unclear why anyone would at first assume they should fall - electrons move at the speed of light. The fact they can be captured into orbits is more surprising than the idea that they don't fall in, or rather, it would seem easier to assume at first that's strange than electrons stick around for any length of time such that things exist as they do.
EDIT - oh, I guess with that old model of them not moving around makes that make sense. But why would anyone today have that confusion when that model was never taught widely, and the alternative was widely for over a hundred years by this point.
They are not moving at the speed of light even in early naive models, their speed was much less
Electrons don't move at all. We simply don't teach this correctly at the high school and undergrad level. ;-)
@@lepidoptera9337 You think electron's don't move? They don't stand still!
@@tonywells6990 An electron is a quantum of energy. Quanta only "exist" when an irreversible energy exchange has taken place. "The quantum" is the amount of energy, momentum, angular momentum and charge that the two systems have exchanged. It's like an accounting quantity. It is not like a moving object.
So all physicists had to do to explain why electrons don't fall onto the nucleus was write an equation that says the electron can't fall onto the nucleus. Genius. I wish my job was that easy.
If it was that easy, then you wouldn't have failed science class. ;-)
@@lepidoptera9337 🤣🤣🤣I didn't fail science class. Not even close. But it certainly is a failure for you to make such an ignorant, and wrong, assumption.
@@AnAntidisestablishmentarianist I can only judge you by your own statements. If you don't want to sound like somebody who failed science class, then don't make statements like somebody who failed science class. Now is your time to rise. So far you keep falling. ;-)
@AnAntidisestablishmentarianist. Exactly correct. An electron does not fall on to the nucleus because the electron does not fall on to the nucleus. We write a Schrödinger Equation that says the electron does not fall on to the nucleus. Then we believe the equation, even though the equation is completely alien to our experience in the macroscopic world. But the answer is still "it does not because it does not". Your snarky comment -- alleging that creating quantum physics was easy -- is funny for those of us who like to laugh.
@@jwestney2859 Yes, that was total bullshit. Dudes, you need to stop repeating every bit of bullshit you hear. ;-)
That deriving quantum mechanics was hard is true. But that doesn't make quantum mechanics hard to understand AFTER it was derived by giants. The problem is that none of you seem to be listening to what those giants found out for your benefit. That's just intellectual laziness at work;-)
Page 6:12 Lost of electric charge/force/energy of an orbiting electron move it to a higher orbit and not lower. On the other hand lost of momentum takes it to a lower orbit.
If electron charge loss continues the orbit may be too large ending in 1. a drifting electron or 2. Gravity kicks in bind the charge-less electron (now subatomic particle) at the nucleus.
Could both the nucleus and subatomic particles were attached to one another originally, only to exhibit a difference charge when forced apart, electrically?
It will cause the orbit to spiral in as it will lose angular momentum and the strongly attractive electric force will take over resulting in the orbit to spiral in, not out
We are talking about electrons and protons here not celestial bodies
gravity in that context is inconsequential.
At 5:45, you stated that an accelerating electron should lose energy, but your quantum model removes that requirement by stating that ... we don't know how the electron moves or if the electron moves at all ?!? To me, that is a little bit gross: you freely "wave" away the problem of NOT having to lose energy, and thus, not having to explain it, isn't it?
Excellent description. Thanks
More importantly, where does all of the energy come from when the nucleus is split? How is this energy generated, and how can we control it safely? Is it possible to start a chain reaction in a super collider that could cause major destruction? How many things do we think we know about atomic elements that we know only by our inadequate linguistic explanations?
1. Strong force
2. We already do
3. No
4. We have adequate explanations
Congratulations to this very digestable an interesting presentation!
One wish:
Please reduce the visual footage to illustrations of what you are actually trying to explain. There is no need to add "pretty wiggle patterns" just to keep the viewers eyes busy. This has become a huge niussance on UA-cam. You don't overdoe it here, but still, the tendency is present. The best presentations on UA-cam are those which allow the viewer to "let it all in" without having to bother to mentally sort out trash and frill.
thank you for your opinion, I'll take this into account
Since I'm not a physicist nor a mathematician I suppose my view could be easily dismissed, but since the proton is also moving through space and not stationary finding the position of the electron would be impossible without knowing the speed of the proton thus also effecting the orbit.
Relative position. Same as how you can observe the position/velocity of the moon in the sky relative to the earth without knowing that the earth is even moving. Or tell that another car on the highway is going faster than you even if you don’t know your own speed.
@@kansasllama ok so what's our position and velocity in the galaxy? And what's the speed of the galaxy?
@@robertlivingston1634 Both are answerable questions, but I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head. But what’s relevant here is the concept of relative motion. “Our speed IN the galaxy” doesn’t really make sense. It’s our speed relative to the center of our galaxy that’s the relevant concept here. And again, it’s a number that I don’t know off the top of my head.
@@kansasllama the galaxy is moving through space and I think at best we could make a theoretical estimate for that speed. As far as our position and speed we're traveling around the galaxy, that's most likely a theoretical estimate also. I've seen articles about how far other galaxies are away from us and by measuring light scientists can determine how fast they're moving apart, but that's not the same as how fast we're actually moving through space.
I've always said that the electron is bound to the nucleus via the nucleus wave function energy, thus the wave function of the electron is direct related to the nucleus wave function. Thus different atoms have different "looks" or signatures when it comes to wave functions. The electron is a kind of signature of the nucleus and the nucleus can be analized via the electrons around it. The electrons and nucleus are interlinked.
The electrons cannot "fall" into the atom because the wave energy onto the electron eminates from the nucleus energy function. Here an electron is a wave function of the atom. When in free space unbound by a nucleus an electron is a particle due to a lack of wave function energy linked by a nucleus.
So let me see if I understood what you said. You are saying that even though the positive and negative charges do attract, the electron won't fall on the proton because of the uncertainty principle and math? Because then we would know precisely where the electron is?
No, there is no a "precise electron" to be placed, the wave IS the electron itself.
Particles are not little marbles with a defined size, particles are small excitations of an underlaying layer of reality, the quantum field without a size or position defined at the most fundamental level.
Yep, that's what he is reporting scientists think! 🤣😂🤣😂
Voice sounds like AI. But sounds very natural. What software did you use for text to speech?
huggingface.co/
Answer: It does. But the diameter of the largest nucleus is about 15 femtometers, while the wavelength of the gamma rays emitted on positron-electron annihilation are much larger, about 2.43 picometers. The gamma ray sized electron completely surrounds the nuclueus of even the largest atoms and cannot be squeezed into the nucleus under normal heat and pressure--only at the core of a star.
So no answer 😂😂😂😂
nope no answer they dont even comprehend what they are doing much less the results
@@EnergyTRE i think we even not sure about the orbits and distances… maybe those spooky bastard electrons are everywhere between there and not there…
@@BMRStudio very accurate observation. it used to be known as the Æther. now they have many names for it. even spooky action at a distance uses the Æther. one must think of hitting a nail on the head not whipping a rope for this to make sense. they are bean counters not scientist. i dint expect them or anyone to understand.
Ghost particles
😂😂😂😂 No boys its the answer they can't find there is no answer you know 1+1=? But a+1=? You call a1 😂😂😂 claps for that but it is unknown may be or may not
Electrons tunnel through the nucleus all the time… but they are repelled by the down quarks. The real question is why does charge, repulsion, or attraction even exist?
Repulsion and attraction exists because of differences in density of wave field. Waves transfer energy, but they transfer energy at different rate in different configurations. When one side receives more energy at average than other - then this excess energy creates work.
I suppose Jesus did it. Or perhaps Vishnu. Or it just is what it is.
Onto or into ? I dont think that with the size of an electron , even if its possible that the electron would be gobbled up.
It could be because the model is wrong. Maybe the 'valances' are just different stationary points on the nucleus, and the electrons just get kicked up like dust and then settle again, each in a different position that is a fixed distance away from the center of the clump. It makes more sense than magic electron valence jumping without going through the intervening space, and orbits that do not decay.
I thought the electron can't fall into the nucleus for the same reason a drunken sailor who stagers 1 step in a random direction every moment will not be infinitely close to a bar, even if the direction to the bar is bius in the random probability of her staggering.
The average distance between the sailor and the bar is relative to the size of the step per moment in the simulation. If it were possible to take an infinitely small step in infinitesimal time then the drunken sailor would be infinitely close to the bar. However, Planck distance prevents this and thus electron orbits have non-zero size.
Is my sense of this close to being correct or is there something I'm missing?
If you're using a toy pingpong-paddle that has an elastic band attaching the ball to the paddle, then why doesn't that elastic band pull the ball into the paddle?
Because the ball and paddle are being bopped around. Same thing is happening with the electrons and the nucleus.
Space at the tiny small scale is unstable, and bops around tiny objects. You and I are too big to notice it, but tiny electrons and nuclei are certainly small enough to be affected.
"Fortunately, physicists studying the real world always have the opportunity to ask the universe whether a particular hypothesis is true by conducting an experiment"
What a nice way to define what experiments is...!!!
In 19:35 you apply the Heisenberg theorem but you do it with the assumption density=0 at the edges. Couldn't it be just small? What shape has the pdf?
Can the atom be considered a perpetual motion machine ?
perpetual motion is not a problem. Getting infinite energy from it is
IF its orbiting then wouldn't Gravity/force be in play in the orbit ?
Where do they get their Energy from ??
Perhaps the best one can do representing quantum mechanics in this context is to interpret the electron as a "probability cloud" or "distribution", representing the likelihood that the electron occupies a position within a certain region. Yes that seems quite abstract, but that is what it takes (in spades!) to understand quantum mechanics!
No, that's pretty much the worst you can do. It's 100% false, even though many people will tell you that. It's a very good example for why one shall not trust the majority opinion if it has been formed by mindless repetition without actual analysis.
That "explanation" would simply state THAT it is extremely unlike to ever end up inside the nucleus, not WHY.
@@antred11 The problem is much deeper that that. The mental model that an electron is "somewhere" at any given point in time is entirely wrong.
its going to take decades more to refute quantum 'uncertainty'
@@rogerjohnson2562 It's well defined. You just don't know the definition. ;-)
Nice journey of discovery. I would have emphasized DeBroglie how he started with Schroedinger wave equation and adapted it to include special relativity … and thereby explained subtleties in spectral emissions which Schroedinger did not. Plus predicting antimatter (positrons) which were discovered a few years later.
There are some other channels with content that goes well with yours. Physics Explained, Huygen’s Optics, are two. There’s an excellent UA-cam video of the development of Maxwell’s equations which reminds me of your narrative (people, their discoveries, how they build up to the complete current picture by Maxwell
To be truthful, many aspects of QM cannot be understood but must simply be accepted because they are in agreement with observations.
The deeper question is "why are electrons quantized in the first place, such that they can only occupy orbitals (energy levels) at specific radii from the the nucleus?" Or, "why is the speed of light what it is, and not some faster or slower speed?" Or, "why is the value of Planck's Constant what it is, and not some value larger or smaller?". Maybe we aren't smart enough to answer those questions yet, or maybe I'm not educated enough to understand quantum mechanics. But I do love these videos, that try to bring the most extreme concepts of science to some kind of level that a layperson can grasp.
The speed of light is 1 in a rationally chosen system of units. That follows from the relativity principle, which is just an equivalent way of saying that the universe is empty. Planck's constant is also 1. The first number that is not 1 after well chosen units is the fine structure constant. It's roughly 1/137, no matter how we chose units. There are another 20 or so in our current best model of the world.
@@lepidoptera9337- I just watched a video about the Fine Structure Constant, not having much familiarity with it, and heard something that is causing a lot of concern among physicists: recent data from the Large Hadron Collider suggests that the value of the FSC may not be uniform. At extremely high energy levels, some of the proton collision fragments that the LHC generates, can only be explained if the value of the FSC at those energy levels is about 1/150, and if this is correct - that the FSC increases as energy increases, then some of the assumptions that string theory is built on may be invalid. And possibly, what we think we know about quantum mechanics, gravity, and the Standard Model may need to be re-worked to account for this. The problem is that there's only the one LHC: normally, new discoveries like this need to be repeatable by physicists in any lab anywhere in the world, but there are no other particle accelerators that come even close to being able to duplicate the energies that the LHC can pump into proton collisions.
@@laura-ann.0726 I am not convinced that "physical constants" like the fine structure constant have to be scale independent. They may also depend on cosmological time (i.e. they may have been different in the deep future than they are today) and they may vary spatially as well. None of this can be ruled out and none of it has been. There is plenty of theoretical literature that tries to elaborate the consequences of these hypotheses and that attempts to find observational data and experimental evidence for/against the constancy of these constants. That is real, hard physics. It's the questions we have to be asking and we are.
The standard model is an effective field theory, i.e. it is a fit. It describes much (if not all of the data if we are adding more terms) beautifully, but it explains nothing, at least not in the sense in which quantum mechanics managed to explain e.g. the structure of the periodic table or the properties of semiconductors. Nobody denies that. String theory was/is one attempt to push past this state of half-knowledge. It did, unfortunately, not reward us with what we are looking for, at least not yet. I have my doubts that it ever will.
What we know about quantum mechanics is on a slightly different level. QM is like thermodynamics or geometry. It's a framework. Neither can ever be "falsified" because none are making hard experimentally testable statements about nature. "What's the radius of an actual circle?" is not something geometry can answer, for instance. It doesn't care about real circles that are just circle-ish squiggles. In the same sense QM can't answer "What is the electron field?". For these kinds of questions we have to find actual physical evidence and then quantum mechanics tells us what other properties the electron field has to have for logical reasons but it can't say that electrons have to exist and that they have to have 511keV of rest mass energy. For that we needs "something else" and that is not part of quantum mechanics. It's a model application of it. It's one model among many possible other models that nature does not care to implement.
I don't believe we are very good at teaching these sometimes subtle differences between general frameworks that can be elaborated on with mathematics and actual experimental and observational facts sufficiently, neither at the K-12 nor at the professional science level. This leads to a lot of poor mental models, even among professional physicists. I had discussions with theorists who can work quantum field theory back and forth in their sleep in which it turned out that they didn't have any idea what "a particle" actually was. That's because they never make experiments with them, so the actual physical reality of quanta of energy (they are nothing other than "clicks" in detectors) is of no importance to them.
So, yeah... there are non-trivial questions here and not just a few, but usually not at the level that is in the eye of the public. It's just very hard to convey the question "QM and relativity say that U(1)xSU(2)xSU(3) is one possible model of the physical vacuum but we don't know why nature seems to prefer that over SU(8), at least below 1TeV.". To most people that's just gibberish. I admit that this is a hard science communication problem.
@@lepidoptera9337- You might be right, in that we may never be able to describe precisely what every nuance of physical reality is on every scale from Planck Length to the entirety of the Cosmos. Brian Greene says in his books on string theory, that the upper limits of the energy that an earth-based particle accelerator can achieve, are probably at least 10 orders of magnitude too small to generate proton collisions that could provide direct evidence of strings. If I understood what I was reading, we have never observed individual quarks. The forces that bind triplets of up and down quarks in protons and neutrons, are much to strong to be severed in even the most energetic collision that the LHC can produce. We see amazing showers of particles that explode outward from proton-proton collisions in the LHC, but no "naked quarks" so far. So, quarks themselves are just a theoretical model that fits observed data. Same with gluons, photons, and electrons, I guess. The Bohr Model of the atom that I became familiar with in high school isn't really correct. In some kinds of experiments, and devices like the electron gun in an old CRT television set, electrons seem to behave like little bullets that spray out from the gun, and hit phosphrus dots painted on the inside of the screen. And voila, you are watching the 7:00 o'clock news, or a movie or game show. But in other kinds of experiments, most famously the double-slit, electrons form interference bands on the screen, a behavior that can only be explained if electrons are probability waves. Electrons orbiting atomic nuclei in their respective orbital shells totally behave like fields of electric potential, and I've learned to visualize an atom as a nucleus of photons, neutrons, and gluons that are not little balls of "solid stuff" that you could poke at with a very small stick, but as a kind of "soup" of potential energy waves, where the mass of those particles is maybe just an illusion, and all that's really there is just field potentials and waves of energy flowing around at impossibly high speeds. The orbiting electrons are the maybe the same: not tiny solid balls of hard matter, but just probability waves of energy that are required by some fundamental force to only occupy specific energy states at specific distances from the nucleus. When an incoming photon, with just the right wavelength, is absorbed by one of these electrons, it might cause that electron to jump to a higher orbital for some period of time, before it re-emits that photon and falls back to it's lowest available orbital. But none of the players in this dance should be visualized as little balls of physical stuff, but as "fields" of potential.
The reality of the materials that make up our human bodies, is that normal matter is something like 99.99999999% "empty space" - this being the regions of the atom between the nuclei and the inner electron orbital, and the regions between orbitals. Pick up a rock from your garden. It's likely mostly silicon dioxide, with some small amounts of other carbonate minerals and salts. Feels solid in your hand, right? But it's an illusion. What you are feeling is the resistance of the electrons in the skin covering your hand, pushing against the electrons in the minerals comprising the surface of the rock. Electric fields pushing against each other. Both your hand and the rock are almost entirely empty space if you could "see" what's actually there on a sub-atomic level. I've tried to explain this to my friends, and most of them can't picture it any better than I can. I'm just a person who has read a lot and not a professional scientist of any kind. Do Brian Greene, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Don Lincoln, or any of the other scientists who try to make their world at least slightly comprehensible to us laypeople, really comprehend on a gut level, these ultimate mysteries?
Brian Greene says himself that it's likely that string theory might never be "provable" in the ways that the physicists of the early 20th century proved the science that led to nuclear fission, digital computers, light-emitting diodes, lasers, and mag-lev high speed trains. He said, "Strings, if they exist in reality, are probably going to be so small that we will never be able to detect them with any device that humans could build. They will forever be only a theoretical model that does, or does not, fit observed data".
@@laura-ann.0726 "If I understood what I was reading, we have never observed individual quarks."
I think that depends on what we want to call "observation". We have scattering diagrams that show how electrons "bounce off protons". When plotted in a certain way they show a three-fold symmetry. Am I looking at the equivalent of a photo of three quarks there the way I would be looking at the two eyes, mouth and nose of a person who is standing in the sunlight in front of me? What's the fundamental difference between the two "observations", other than that they require different "cameras" and that my body happens to have a built in detector for the scattering of 1.5eV photons but not for 100GeV electrons?
I think to a certain extent it is a matter of personal choice what we want to call reality here. To me that scattering diagram is perfectly "real" and it is a perfectly meaningful projection of "what's inside a proton". That there are phenomena that can't be separated without losing their meaning or becoming something completely different is also not restricted to the microscopic world. The poles of a magnet can not be separated, already. If we cut a magnet in half we get two magnets, each with two new poles. Same with a proton. If we "take it apart" we get either new nucleons or unstable quark-anti-quark states. Is that all that different from a macroscopic magnet? Both phenomena are a direct mathematical consequence or relativity. Nature can't avoid them. To me the latter insight far outweighs the conceptual question of "What is a quark?".
"But in other kinds of experiments, most famously the double-slit, electrons form interference bands on the screen, a behavior that can only be explained if electrons are probability waves."
That, unfortunately, is one of the worst PR disasters of physics and Richard Feynman may be responsible for it. It's a completely false explanation of quantum phenomena. Quanta are amounts of energy. What we are detecting in "the double slit" is NOT
the behavior of things. It's the microscopic behavior of energy. That's the reason why it does not matter if we are doing scattering experiments with photons, electrons, neutrons, helium atoms or Buckyballs. That's why it wouldn't matter if we could do it with golf balls. Energy always behaves the same, no matter what kind of system is exchanging it.
"...where the mass of those particles is maybe just an illusion..."
It's no more an illusion than energy, momentum and angular momentum. It's just a system property. At the end of the day physics is all about properties. It's not about objects. One could teach that really early with suitable examples (as early as kindergarten, in my opinion) and then the transition from object to property based thinking that is required in modern physics would be much easier for most people. We are simply stuck in the materialist mindset of the 19th century in our K-12 education. We are testing the living daylights out of our kids with problems like "A car rolls down a 15 degree incline. Calculate the normal force that the car exerts on the surface." that suggest that the words "car" and "incline" have some deep meaning, so everybody learns to think that physics is all about rolling and gliding and flying objects. It isn't. It's about the exchange of energy, momentum, angular momentum and charges between systems. We should teach THAT first, because thinking in systems is a general "divide and conquer" strategy that is useful outside of physics.
Well, don’t they fall inward to create neutrons?
I think it's really funny how the deeper we look we see that everything is revolving around something
No matter how strong it is it pulls toward something bigger
Yet it wants it's space
So why doesn't the negatively-charged electron just fall into the positively-charged nucleus?
Question is where did all the electrons come from. Curious that every proton has a corresponding electron. Why are there exactly enough electrons and no extras ?
Sometimes there are some extra electrons, but then the atom is not neutral any more, becoming a negative ion. Or if it lacks some electrons, a positive ion. The salt in your kitchen consists of positive sodium ions and negative chlorine ions, which each "stole" an elctron from a sodium atom.
@@user-gr5tx6rd4h yes. Now it does but in the beginning when everything formed before chemistry.
That's the leptogenesis problem. There should have been equal numbers of electrons and positrons in the early universe and equal numbers of quarks and anti-quarks. There weren't. Electrons "won" a slight majority and because of charge conservation (which is most likely absolute), that process had to create protons as well.
Visualize a charge aleays moving .. it flies through the spaces between charges then flies away.. to have its orbit bend back...
My definitive guess is that disallowed electrons actually do fall into the nucleus, and they do fly in and out of orbits in every possible way. However, all "disallowed" states decohere from the "classical measuring apparatus" (the observer). Therefore-ish, all we can ever observe are the electrons that remain in their quantum orbits. IOW, the observer is the sustainer of the electrons' quantum orbits because the observer is also quantum and can only see the electrons that are in coherence with the state of the observer. (Wha?)
The reason is similar to why satellite's in a geostationary orbit do not fall out of orbit. On those stationary orbits, the forces neutralize and cancel or balance each other out, but outside of those orbits the forces are not in equilibrium. But system's whose state of equilibrium is disrupted or disturbed will always tend to revert back to a state of equilibrium, from their state of non-equilibrium. The natural tendency is always to restore balance or equilibrium. This is the principle way in which energy is conserved. This is the law of entropy. By rights, entropy should always be a measure of order in a system, not it's disorder.
It's because they are not particles when you consider them bound. They are standing waves. Of something. We can describe the something but have no idea what it is.
In the classical understanding of the atom, the electrons, of course, do not rotate around the nucleus, but revolve around the nucleus.
Electrons do not orbit but fit into defined locations like plasma tufts, defined by charge points on the nucleus.
The Bohr model is a red herring. Electrons do not orbit unless there is an input energy large enough to break the electron out of its position around the nucleus.
Electrons and protons are condensers of the ether medium.
Quantum computing experiments show that there is an electro-magnetic ether shell around all atoms, electrons and protons that can be controlled as a 'qubit' by an electric field or laser.
It is the ether shell discovered by quantum computing experiments around the electrons and protons that provides the needed tension and keeps the electron out of the nucleus.
The ether, AKA the Dirac ether, is dipole particles or photons that engage in flux cancellation around the atom to neutralize the Coulomb forces within.
Newtonian mechanics just doesn't work at that dimension because it does not account for physical principles which apply only at atomic dimensions. It is an error to expect that macroscopic phenomena would scale down to an arbitrary degree.
Why should charged subatomic particles be the only things in the Universe that do not carry an Electric Field?
All electrons travel in a straight-line past atom but are drawn back towards atomic orbitals by the negative positive asymmetrical oscillations of color charge.
Emerging energetic actors indirectly detected are amazing but to scale of atoms the fact anything and everything it can ever be that is definable is absolutely amazing 👏
Actually, the wavelength of a tennis ball is zero. Experiments have shown (and I forget the source) that anything larger than the planck mass has a wavelength of zero.
Can neutrons be pushed into other neutrons?
No. Neutrons, as electrons and protons, are fermions, and fermions cannot do that kind of things
@@TerraPhysica so I wonder what stage happens to atoms after neutron stars.
@@TerraPhysica That a neutron star is a dense package of fermions is yet another poor mental picture. We simply don't know what the spectrum of the standard model looks like at these densities. We can't do the necessary quantum-chromodynamics calculations, yet. I wouldn't be surprised to find that neutron star matter is capable of a very rich SU(3) chemistry, in the same way that ordinary matter can do very rich U(1) chemistry.
Why didnt u say Rutherford's famous line " it was like firing a cannonball into tissue paper and having it rebound straight back!"