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
It’s sort of everywhere throughout the orbital all at once until it needs to be in a specific location, and then it chooses a location more or less randomly. Probably. There’s still a lot of debate about it.
If that sounds bizarre, unintuitive, and unhelpful… welcome to quantum mechanics! It’s real weird.
The key concept here is the *wave function*, which is the “mathematical function” that you mentioned. It’s a function that describes the relative probabilities of finding the electron in any specific place if you go looking for it. Until you go looking for it, it’s in all of those places in proportion to their weight in the wave function. Once you look for it the wave function *collapses* to a single possible value and that’s where the electron is.
I’ve used the intentionally vague “go looking for it” here because I don’t think it’s entirely clear yet how this interaction works. There are lots of different conjectures to explain it. There almost certainly isn’t anything special about our consciousness or the act of observation that causes the wave function collapse (and it’s possible the collapse isn’t even a collapse but something else entirely) but we don’t yet have a bulletproof answer on how it works.
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