Electrons have orbitals, not orbits. "Electron orbitals are the probability distribution of an electron in a atom or molecule" The above picture is an electron orbital from the page. Electrons exist as a standing wave when captured in an atom.
Posted on 03/09/2002 5:41:26 PM PST by freedom9
It is rather vague.
But then, so is the subtle distinction between "alternate reality" and "false paradigm".
These things are predicted from Einstein's math, and are well supported by experiment.
The term particle, I should think, has mass
built into it by definition. But if you will
consider the wave/particle duality of
matter, does a wave have mass?
When I was a boy, forty years ago, an atheist had some pretty firm ground to stand on. Really it was already too late for him but your average atheist's concept of the cosmos was not all that fantastic or limitless. Oh yeah, we had heard by then that the universe was 'infinite' but who amoung us had even the tiniest inkling of infinite?
Then along came guys like Carl Sagan (bless his pagan soul even though he was a godless piker) and the Hubbel telescope. Now we have pictures of galaxies scattered thicker than the stars we can see with earthbound telescopes in every direction and we know that each one of them is akin in size to our own and we know that we cannot even really grasp the enormity of our own one little galaxy. But we have an inkling.
We know enough to realize that the universe we can SEE is an impossiblity. It's just impossibly big. The situation we find ourselves in is just ...... impossible. It's almost as impossible believing there is an intelligence, a being, a God who willed the whole thing into being. It's as impossible the scientifically supported 'near fact' that at the moment of the big bang .... nothing became everything Hubble can see at our moment in time. It's all impossible. It's all just too fantastic to grasp.
So the poor atheist today just knows too much. He no longer has a nice neat little scientific universe to postulate as a more creditable alternative to a God created universe. Each idea is equally absurd to our enfeebled little minds. BUT one is now trully free to place his faith with confidence for logic recoils from everything we know as fact now so why fear the decision to have faith in God? One is in an impossible pickle anyway. Ya might as well take the safe bet.
The strong and weak nuclear forces? Electron shielding? Gluon attraction? Too bad Physicist isn't here, I'm in over my head..
Light is both a wave and a particle. Einstein won the Nobel prize for his work on the photoelectric effect. It predicted the particle-like features of light.
Light is quantized into photons. When light strikes a metal plate, electrons are released. If light were only wave-like, the frequency of the light would not affect the number of electrons released. Since light has a particle-nature, the higher frequency light of the same intensity (energy content) as lower frequency light liberates more electrons from a metal plate.
But I do think that whenever energy is drawn upon itself, when orbits are entered and achieved, mass comes into play.
The greater the amount of enery bound in circular motion, the greater the mass and the greater space/time distortion. I see phontons as a quantive unit of force rather than an actual particle. And there is no discrepancy that a units of force can't propogate as a wave.
Were all matter played upon an infinite mass, (which in fact would be a singularity), energy would be propogating in a medium not much unlike a superconductor.
What do you think of the recent stories of the 5th dimension that may be measured in the lab within 3 years? 95% of the mass of the universe is said to be dark matter and dark energy, and resides in this 5th dimension. This 5th dimension is not thought to be almost immeasurably small like the rest of the superstring dimensions, but of the order of millimeters in size. Bigger than neuronal complexes in the brain. Bigger than the amount clipped off the nail with nail clippers. Heard of that? There have been a couple 5th dimension threads on FR recently.
This is what happened to Newtonian mechanics, and resulted in Einstein's theory. At "normal" velocities, its' answers are equivalent to Newton's. Since Newton's equations are easier to use, it is more common to use them for "everyday" applications. Mechanical engineering is one example.
Electrons have orbitals, not orbits. "Electron orbitals are the probability distribution of an electron in a atom or molecule" The above picture is an electron orbital from the page. Electrons exist as a standing wave when captured in an atom.
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