Sorry for the stupid question guys. im not the best in science.
In: Chemistry
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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