Sorry for the stupid question guys. im not the best in science.
In: Chemistry
It’s not “revolution”, but rather being pulled closer and pushed away by various fundamental forces. They end up basically bouncing around in a cloud – like those illustrations of sound waves and sand on a sheet over a speaker (https://youtu.be/tFAcYruShow?si=D5rOqzAOaT-0lJf4), just instead of sound and gravity pushing the sand around, it’s fundamental forces pushing electrons around
I know that’s the common image presented, but they actually don’t revolve around the nucleus.
Let’s start with some actual basics. Electrons are bound to the nucleus because the nucleus is positively charged and electrons are negatively charged. It is genuinely just electrostatic attraction.
Here’s where the easy ends. Electrons don’t exist as a little ball zipping around. They have wave properties which dictate where you can or cannot find an electron.
What happens around the nucleus is that this electron wave will interfere with itself, and cancel out to zero in some places and reinforce in others.
Where it’s zero, you can’t find an electron. Where it’s not zero, you can. The places where you can find them are called “orbitals”.
But don’t let the name fool you, they’re still not like orbits of planets. They have different shapes, like a ball, kind of like a bowtie, a doughnut. And they’ll change shapes depending on bonding with other atoms. It’s quite a complex topic.
No need to apologize, questions are how you learn!
Electrons actually exist in more of a cloud (that is, a field that tends to bend and compress but generally stays a sphere-ish shape) around the nucleus.
The reason they are portrayed that way on paper is just because it’s much easier to visualize and work with :3
The electrons move because of the forces between the negative charge of the election and the positive/neutral charge of the nucleus.
If electrons didn’t move, then that means they wouldn’t have any charge (or it is being disrupted in some way), which means that atoms and molecules wouldn’t stay apart/stick together correctly… which means life as we know it would not exist!
You know how when you hold two magnets against one another, they push each other apart as if there was some kind of gelatinous ‘thing’ between them, even though there is nothing?
Think of what we call ‘electrons’ as being made up of the same kind of nothing-stuff. They’re not actually ‘things’ and as such they don’t ‘revolve’ or ‘fly’ or even ‘are’ in any specific place. Electron is what we call a place where there is a charge that can be in all sorts of places around a proton core (another not-thing).
Since these places can change, we use words like ‘revolve’ and ‘spin’ to describe different properties of theirs. But those are metaphors and have actually very little to do with the ‘balls flying around other balls’ models that we teach children.
Do they revolve? Not really. That’s just an easy way to think about it for chemistry, but that’s not what’s happening in physics.
What’s really happening is that the electron is behaving like a wave, and the electron “orbital” is just a place where the electron’s wave function fits. Outside of those specific orbitals, the electron can’t exist as part of that atom’s cloud.
Think of it like blowing on a jug. The sound you get is all of the sound waves that resonate inside the jug. Those resonate sound waves are like the electrons in their orbitals. If you fill the just with some water, the size of the interior of the jug, which means you changed the resonant frequencies, which changes the sound you get. That is like changing the number of protons in the nucleus, which changes the size of the orbitals the electrons can inhabit, which is why every element has its own energy levels for each orbital.
There are 3 numbers we use to describe the electron orbitals, n, l, and m (that’s a lowercase L)
n is the energy level, starting at 1 and counting up. n is the innermost, and it’s like the fundamental frequency of the atoms electron cloud.
l is the angular momentum. It starts at 0 and can go up to n-1
That means electrons in the n=1 orbital can not have angular momentum, which means they do not orbit at all. If we think about it classically, the electron is falling back and forth through the atomic nucleus in a straight line (although that’s not what’s really happening)
In the n=2 orbital, we can still have the l=0 electrons, which do the same thing as the n=1, they just have more energy and reach a distance further from the nucleus. The l=1 electrons are the first ones we can actually think of as “orbiting” but even then, they’re really not.
m is the magnetic quantum number, and it’s not really important to what we are talking about. It starts at 0 and can go as high and low as +l and -l
[Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/s/L3wTjc8Gw5) are diagrams of what the electron clouds look like for each state. The numbers shown are n, l, and m, and it leaves out any negative m values because the clouds look the same, but they are just in the opposite “direction”
The clouds are the probability of where we are to find an electron.
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