Sorry, I misunderstood. Makes more sense now.
Electrons "use" no energy in their ordinary zipping around inside their orbitals.
Alright, I'm going out on a limb here on this one. When an electron does its thing in its orbital, it alternates between some positive and negative state, right? It's been a long time since I learned about this, so maybe "positive" and "negative" and "state" aren't the right words - but in any case, they oscillate between two conditions, which is what governs whether or not they're able to link up with the electron clouds of other atoms to form molecules. Would it be reasonable to suggest that this is in some way analogous to a pendulum swinging back and forth, in that the pendulum continually converts its energy from one form to another and back again (in this case kinetic and potential energy)? IOW is there a similar transfer of energy when an electron moves between its two phases? If so, would such energy transfer qualify as "use" of energy?
This no more violates the second law than a planet orbiting a star violates the second law.
I was under the impression that an orbiting planet did in fact exemplify the Second Law, since it does lose energy over time (albeit slowly).
(BTW, why would creationists care about whether electrons lose their energy in the atom? Are they arguing that God continually intervenes to keep the electrons from falling in?)
I don't recognize this as anything I know. Electrons stay negative. Bonds are formed with other atoms by either sharing an electron in something like a figure-8 loop around both nuclei (covalent bonding) or loaning an electron from one to another (ionic bonding), leaving both atoms with a net charge and thus ionized.
(BTW, why would creationists care about whether electrons lose their energy in the atom? Are they arguing that God continually intervenes to keep the electrons from falling in?)
Setterfield uses the slowing of light to explain why the universe looks old but isn't. (I don't think this stuff works well at all, really.) He uses the ZPE increasing over time to explain why light slows down. (The vacuum thickens and gets harder to plow.) Somewhere in there he works in why electrons don't spiral down, which has not been regarded as much of a question since Bohr's day.
Setterfield also notes (as does Hal Putoff) that in classical atomic theory electrons circling the nucleus are accelerated particles and ought to radiate energy, but apparently they don't--according to the tacit assumptions of modern physics. Setterfield suggests that energy is actually being fed into every atom in the universe from the vacuum at precisely the rate electrons are dissipating this energy. The calculated total amount of this energy input is enormous, of the order of 1.071 x 10117 kilowatts per square meter. (Some have physicist have claimed that the latent energy resident in the vacuum is infinite, but Setterfield is content to be conservative, he says!) 10117 is of course a very large number in any case. [The total number of atoms in the universe is only ~ 1066, the total number of particles in the universe is only ~ 1080, the age of the universe is only about ~ 1017 seconds. And any event with a probability of less than 1 part in 1050 is considered "absurd."]From Implications of a Non-Constant Velocity of Light by Lambert Dolphin.
It's all just nuts. Electrons in stable orbits are not particularly accelerated particles. At any rate, they can only give off energy in discrete quantized bits corresponding to certain energies and certain orbitals or not at all. They're also excluded from being at the same energy level and the same spin state as any other electron. They can't spiral gradually in, glowing feebly as they go.