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
Electrons do not have a position at most moments. That’s the key idea here: you cannot think of an electron as a tiny billiard ball flying around. It is, fundamentally, a smeared out “cloud” that has only an *average expected* position and not a single well-defined “position it is definitely in”.
The orbitals don’t change over time. So in that sense, the electron cloud isn’t “moving”. But in another sense, you could talk about the average velocity of the electron itself, and that average is not zero – if you measure the electron, it will on average be moving (quite fast, in fact, by conventional standards). In addition to having an indefinite position, the electron also has an indefinite speed.
Yes, this is all quite weird and not at all intuitive. But it’s how the math works out.
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