Also please don’t look at it
Electrons are easy
Submitted 11 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/a7289d8f-dfa0-4849-945e-715e12a471af.jpeg
Comments
Haagel@lemmings.world 11 months ago
credo@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I mean, you can but it won’t be there.
hsr@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
Actually, it can be there, but then you won’t know how fast it’s moving.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
[deleted]merc@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
That’s not a good analogy because typically cameras don’t change the things they’re observing. But, a camera with a flash…
Imagine a guy driving down a dark road at night. Take a picture of him without a flash and you’ll get a blurry picture.
Take a picture of him with a powerful flash and you’ll get an idea of exactly where he was when the picture was taken, but the powerful flash will affect his driving and he’ll veer off the road.
You can’t measure something without interacting with it. This is true even in the non-quantum world, but often the interactions are small enough to ignore. Like, if you stick a meat thermometer into a leg of lamb, you’ll measure its temperature. But, the relatively cool thermometer is going to slightly reduce the temperature of the lamb.
At a quantum level, you can no longer ignore the effect that measuring has on observing. The twin-slit experiment is the ultimate proof of this weirdness.
whotookkarl@lemmy.world 11 months ago
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” -George Box
Bassman1805@lemmy.world 11 months ago
My advanced E&M professor said “Imagine a sphere of radius zero. Trust me, it works.”
qprimed@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
“…Imagine a sphere of radius zero.”
and a spherical cow. imagining lots of spherical cows cows helps quite a bit.
Bassman1805@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Radiating milk equally in all directions, of course.
bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
Neato@ttrpg.network 11 months ago
It’s a point but it doesn’t actually exist at any point. It exists in a cloud where it could exist anywhere in there.
Quill7513@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
You can observe it but doing so changes its behavior. Why? Well… Um… Maybe it’s just the simulation breaking down?
peto@lemm.ee 11 months ago
It’s because to observe something you have to interact with it. Dealing with particles is like playing pool in the dark and the only way you can tell where the balls are is by rolling other balls into them and listening for the sound it makes. Thing is, you now only know where the ball was, not what happened next.
In the quantum world, even a single photon can influence what another particle is doing. This is fundamentally why observation changes things.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I think a lot of the confusion people have is around the word “observation” which in everyday language implies the presence of an intelligent observer. It seems totally nonsensical that the outcome of a physics experiment should depend on whether the physicist is in the lab or out for a coffee! That’s because it is!
I have this beef with a lot of words used in physics. Taking an everyday word and reusing it as a technical term whose meaning may be subtly and/or profoundly different from the original. It’s a source of constant confusion.
Fedizen@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Its that an observation is always an energetic interaction. You can’t measure a system without interacting with it and at the particle scale every interaction has enough energy to affect the particle in some way.
marcos@lemmy.world 11 months ago
+1/2 h and -1/2 h
Fucking hate the people that insist on using only half of the number as if it was a real value. At least say you are working with natural unities or something.
" - How far is your house? - Oh, it’s just 5!"
wolfpack86@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Except in this context the question is “how many blocks away is your house?” Where “5” is a completely valid response
VitaminF@feddit.org 11 months ago
It’s h-bar, not h. And it really does make sense if you look deeper I to the math.
marcos@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Using “+1/2” and “-1/2” as vector labels is fine. Using it on the context of “the spin can have those 2 values here” for laypeople without further explanation is just making the subject less accessible.
Also, yeah, I was too lazy to search for the unicode ħ.
peto@lemm.ee 11 months ago
" - How far is your house? - Oh, it’s just 120"
FTFY
niktemadur@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Or how about - “Walk around the block TWICE and it’ll be right there, you can’t miss it.”
sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
You sound like my professor
Technological_Elite@lemmy.one 11 months ago
Google “Electron Orbitals”. All the spaces there are all the possible locations for the electrons. Good Introduction to some Quantum Mechanics 👍
NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 11 months ago
No! I will not relive the horrors of that chemistry class again… you can’t make me. I am happily an aerospace engineer now where I don’t need this chemistry nonsense, or quamtum mechanics.
Technological_Elite@lemmy.one 11 months ago
Ah let’s see, of the top of my head…
1s² 2s² 2d⁶ 3s² 2p¹⁰ …
ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net 11 months ago
All the spaces there are all the possible locations for the electrons.
Close, but not quite - the spaces are the most likely locations for the electrons at any moment in time. There is always a small chance they’ve fucked off over the street for a nanosecond when you take your measurement.
Technological_Elite@lemmy.one 11 months ago
Alrighty then! Thanks for sharing!
reinei@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Except they only look like that if there is an external reference system imposing some structure on the atom! Otherwise all orbitals are basically spherical because they can all just be in a superposition of all possible orbitals and we couldn’t tell a difference…
And then suddenly you have two atoms meeting and need to explain why 1+1=0 for their molecular orbits -.-
flora_explora@beehaw.org 11 months ago
I don’t think so. Orbitals give you the spaces of highest probability! Electrons could be outside as well. And since it is based on probability it is definitely a useful model.
Electronic orbitals are regions within the atom in which electrons have the highest probability of being found.
Technological_Elite@lemmy.one 11 months ago
I’ll have a look at this later, I remember it being any possible existence of an election, not just highest probabilities, from when I was taught this several weeks ago.
MonkderDritte@feddit.de 11 months ago
Ah yes. And if two fields are too close,
teleportationtunneling can happen.
Collatz_problem@hexbear.net 11 months ago
Then you get to “orbital hybridization” and everything quickly goes downhill.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I swear quantum physics is magic and made up!
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 11 months ago
Magnets, how do they work?
purplemonkeymad@programming.dev 11 months ago
I think that is electrostatics + relativity.
Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
If we theorize that the universe is like a computer program then maybe the Universe has several layers of abstraction and we only can access the our current layer and therefore forever having an incomplete model. If something external to our layer is affecting it, it would probably be impossible to know.
SmoothOperator@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Quantum mechanics (and spin) isn’t really mysterious or inaccessible, it’s just not intuitive.
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 11 months ago
Ahh… hmm. In some ways it is literally inaccessible, because we can’t observe it directly. All of our experimental (e.g. real) subatomic knowledge comes from smashing particles into each other at near-light speed and observing the bits that come out, which is somewhat like dropping a smartphone off the Empire State building and trying to figure out how it works by picking up the broken pieces off the sidewalk. We can probe the structure of molecules with electron microscopes, but there are no tools for directly observing anything smaller than that. We draw conclusions for how smaller things behave through inference.
And frankly, the entire concept of spinors and the relationship to observed properties like electron charge is pretty mysterious, and nobody really understands wave-particle duality, that’s just the best explanation we have for what we observe.
Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
How about dark matter and dark energy.
Collatz_problem@hexbear.net 11 months ago
This is basically “hidden variables hypothesis”.
Lemming6969@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You can absolutely know if something external is affecting it. Dark matter and energy might be such a thing. What you might not be able to tell is how those mechanics arise, you’ll only know the aggregate result on your layer.
akakunai@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Stupid Java-ass AbstractUniverseControllerFactoryBuilderSimpleton reality we live in.
Engywuck@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Now everything is clear. Thanks!
silent_water@hexbear.net 11 months ago
they don’t actually spin but they’re little bar magnets as if they do. if you charge a sphere and spin it, you’ll generate exactly the same kind of bar magnet, but they don’t actually spin. and just like bar magnets, like repels like. but they’re neither bar magnets nor spinning. why don’t they spin? because they’re point masses, which don’t have any extent. but actually, you can’t really observe them as point masses because they’re waves.
^^ this was the exact point at which I said quantum mechanics wasn’t for me and I’m done with physics, after completing most of a degree. it sort of all makes sense but at the same time it completely doesn’t. it all makes sense as pure math but the second you try to make sense of the math, sense goes out the window.
quarrk@hexbear.net 11 months ago
It is a good demonstration of the limitations of our own thought. We understand new concepts in terms of familiar concepts. If there is no direct analogy to something familiar, the human mind is utterly lost and has to trust in rigorous analysis while only half believing what it proves.
peto@lemm.ee 11 months ago
The universe is under no obligation to be understandable to the bits of it that can think. In many ways it’s a wonder we’ve got as far as we have.
jol@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
It all makes sense and the more you dig deeper the more it makes sense, but then you zoom out a little and then realize it actually doesn’t make any sense in any sort of palatable way.
silent_water@hexbear.net 11 months ago
yeah, I was lucky to have already taken Classical Mechanics prior to Quantum Mechanics (it wasn’t a prereq so most of my classmates jumped straight into QM), so the math was all perfectly sensible. but the second any prof started trying to use English to interpret the math, I started having these moments where I’d have to sit back and think about the words coming out of their mouths, and sitting with how it was all actually gibberish. Feynman’s “shut up and calculate” started to feel incredibly valid really fast, whereas prior to QM, I was under the impression that physics was natural philosophy. it’s not and QM was the breaking point, at least for me, personally.
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
The closest representation is that cliche television shot where someone’s thinking really hard and equations fly around their head.
MonkderDritte@feddit.de 11 months ago
We haven’t even started with quantum fields yet.
quarrk@hexbear.net 11 months ago
A channel I subscribe to just posted an explainer on spin, for anyone interested
Quill7513@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
“Well… You see… When its a particle it spins. When its a wave its still doing that. How does a waveform spin you ask? Listen. Shut the fuck up. The math is really weird and some of this stuff just happens and you can’t visualize it in your head. We didn’t believe it at first either but after 50 years of experiments we have to just accept that reality is consistent with the math even if we don’t fully conceptualize what that means even”
IndiBrony@lemmy.world 11 months ago
We are all just folds in this wonderfully weird thing we call spacetime!
flicker@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The prions of spacetime.
Out here folding along.
tibi@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Nice reference to PBS Space Time. The YouTube channel where I just get bullied with science, and for some weird twisted reason I like it.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
Hah! Time. Like that’s a real thing.
itsnotits@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Quill7513@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
Phone stuff. Sorry about that
danc4498@lemmy.world 11 months ago
rude bot
Noodle07@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Tits
leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 11 months ago
You seem to be up to date with this stuff; did we find out whether there’s more than one yet…?
Personally don’t like the idea of everyone reusing the same electon for everything… seems quite unhygienic. I’d rather we had at least one per person, maybe share it with people we trust, if we must…
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 11 months ago
We have to recycle nowadays. Besides we can’t have people throwing away perfectly good electrons. They could end up anywhere.
kata1yst@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I’ve heard this weird concept repeated over and over but I’ve never once run across it in literature or in speaking to my particle physicist friend. Can you provide a source?
Mango@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You wrote a comment so good that I screenshotted it.
Quill7513@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
Awww thanks
someacnt_@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Of course waves can spin, it just does so in some conceptual “dimension”.