Thinking with electrons

A. K. Raychaudhuri

Seamus McCelt

Notice they way a lot of molecules tend to form tetrahedrally? A tetrahedron is the opposite diagonal corners of a cube. And the reason being: electrons form a thread-mesh-type cage around the nucleus. Certain sizes are of course the 8 corners of a cube -- that's what the octet rule is and how it happens. It also explains Pi bonds, Sigma bonds and all atomic structures. A lot of atoms and molecules have a bond angle of exactly 109.4712° (degrees). That's tetrahedral. -- corners of the cube. That is NOT probability. It is NOT a cloud. It is NOT a blur. It is NOT uncertainty. It is NOT counterintuitive. IT IS EXACT. Electrons DO NOT have any probability or uncertainty involved Electrons actually are something but everyone mistakenly thinks the vibration travelling around the thread is the electron -- that's what has caused all the confusion. The electron is conveying vibrations but the material it is made from (quantum threads) are NOT moving.. EXAMPLE: Think guitar string -- the string itself would be the electron but everyone thinks the vibration or note is the electron. That is why there is all kinds of probability and uncertainty -- the vibration is traveling around a spherical thread mesh cage -- where exactly is the vibration? No way to know for sure. Got that? The electron has exact position. The vibration position is of course unknown. NOTE: Heisenberg would be OK with this. A vibration of course has uncertain position

Robert B. Morrissey

P. Strange

With the exception of the latter half of chapter 6 we have, up to this point, been discussing single-particle quantum mechanics. This is easy (although you may not think so). One can certainly gain a lot of insight and understanding from a single-particle theory. However, in real life there are very few (no) situations in physics in which a single-particle theory is able to paint the whole picture. Any real physical process involves the interaction of many particles. In fact even that is a vast simplification. Really any physical process involves the interaction of all particles. Even the gravitational attraction due to an electron at the other end of the universe is felt by an electron on earth. To describe all particles in a calculation is, of course, absurd. You would have to include the particles of the paper you are writing the calculation down on and the particles in your brain thinking about the many-body problem. However, many-body theory on a more limited scale is feasible. In this chapter we discuss two ways of going beyond the one-electron approximation. Actually, we are not going very far beyond the one-electron approximation and you will see what is meant by that soon. This chapter is essentially divided into two halves.

Thomas P. Pearsall

Helge Kastrup, Jeffry V. Mallow A

Atomic spectra had twice as many lines as predicted. As a solution, two young physicists, George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit, proposed that in addition to orbiting its nucleus, an electron “spins” around its axis. (Not really, but the idea works.) Wolfgang Pauli showed that the spin could only have two opposing orientations. This could account for all of the lines. He further proposed an “Exclusion Principle”: that no electrons could be described by all the same quantum numbers, otherwise atoms (and we) could not exist. In 1930, he predicted the existence of a new particle, the neutrino, which was not observed until 26 years later. In addition to contributions to quantum mechanics, Pauli was famous for nasty remarks. A couple of gems:“This paper is so bad it is not even wrong.”“I don't mind your thinking slowly; I mind your publishing faster than you think.”