In school, we were/are taught the Bohr model of the atom, that an electron ***orbits*** a nucleus in an elliptical path. Since quantum mechanics entered popular culture, talk has turned to an ***orbital***. Wikipedia defines this as “a mathematical function describing the ***location*** … of an electron in an atom”, I presume in a moment of time. My question is, where do we think the electron will be in the next moment? Will it
(A) Be in an adjacent location? That is to say, does the electrom move in a continuous manner?
(B) Disappear and re-appear in a non-adjacent location? Or
(C) We don’t know?
(If my premise is wrong, please correct me. Otherwise, I hope to steer clear of digressions which don’t answer specifically A, B or C.)
Thanks in advance.
In: 1
I think the key misunderstanding here is the premise of the question. Electron isn’t a tiny ball moving around, so pretty much asking about the location of the electron is a wrong question by itself.
If an electron isn’t a tiny ball, then what is electron? We have a mathematical model of what it is, but that mathematical model does not correspond to anything in everyday life, so there isn’t a simple description “electron is like….”. The closest thing we have is wave-particle duality, which said that a electrons sometimes act like waves, and sometimes act like particles. A good rule of thumb is that an electron act like a wave when it’s moving, and like a particle when it’s interacting. If you want something more detailed than that you would have to look at the mathematical model.
Inside a small stable molecule with no outside interaction, the *entire* group of electron act as a wave, and you have a wave function that describes that wave. The electrons are indistinguishable, and in fact, even the act of separating that single wave into separate electrons is merely a human convention.
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