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
C) We do not know.
Quantum mechanics is completely agnostic about what particles are “really” doing between observations. We know we can describe it using wave mechanics (the guts of QM), but there are many physical models for what that wave fundamentally is – whether it’s an artifact of many universes interacting with each other, whether there’s an actual physical wave pushing particles around, or whether particles are actually just a certain kind of structure contained in the wave, and the wave is actually the more fundamental object in the universe. Quantum mechanics describes a mathematical object rich in structure, but fundamentally inaccessible to us, so we currently have to choose how to interpret it.
The wiki article is a little bit off. The orbital does not describe the location, it describes the probability of finding the electron at these locations. The shape of the orbital does not change over time, so if the electron is in different places at different times, it is undergoing some mechanics beyond what QM describes.
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