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Miscellaneous Questions on electronic orbitals

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Corribus:
PicturesofLilly, why don't you reframe your question without making reference to the videos. Videos on the internet are a mixed bag and it's hard for students to know what is reliable and what isn't. What are you having trouble understanding?

Borek:

--- Quote from: PicturesOfLilly on September 25, 2020, 04:27:48 PM ---
--- Quote from: Borek on September 25, 2020, 09:55:22 AM ---Best advice we can give you is: forget you ever saw that.

--- End quote ---
And then what? Keep asking you questions as you get off on my misery?

--- End quote ---

And then learn from the reliable sources. Yes, it is sometimes hard to say which source is reliable, but we already told you the one you are asking questions about is a trash, so why do you stick to it?

People say plenty of things that are wrong and stupid. If I say '2+2=5' will you start asking around why I wrote that, or if perhaps I am right, or will you just shrug, think "what an idiot" and move along?

Meter:
Chemistry is full of misnomers which were originally coined by scientists who either had incomplete or simply incorrect understandings of the concepts they were studying. For example: oxidation isn't exclusive to reactions involving oxygen, but because the original investigations into what we now call oxidations involved oxygen, the term has been coined as such. This is an example of how misnomers arise from incomplete understanding.

The property of electron "spin" was coined as such because electrons appeared to exhibit a magnetic field (even at rest), and it was thus theorized that electrons must have some sort of rotational movement which accounts for this field. This is wrong, however, as electrons are point-like and don't spin around an axis (like a globe or whatever). Rather they have intrinsic angular momentum, which is equally confusing, but the fact that it is intrinsic just means "deal with it, it exists". I like to think of spin as a property which gives rise to a magnetic field much like how mass is a property which gives rise to a gravitational field. I can accept the latter, so why not accept the former?

Corribus:

--- Quote from: Meter on September 26, 2020, 08:27:43 PM ---This is wrong, however, as electrons are point-like and don't spin around an axis (like a globe or whatever). Rather they have intrinsic angular momentum, which is equally confusing, but the fact that it is intrinsic just means "deal with it, it exists".
--- End quote ---
There are certainly some things that must just be accepted as axiomatic by students of elementary chemistry and physics - and indeed, even from a seasoned chemist's view, some things need not be explained further - but it is unfair to say that science in general treats unexplained phenomena this way. There are reasonable and tested theories about why electron spin exists, despite their "pointlike" nature. I believe the current thinking involves virtual photon formation in the electric field generated by an electron in motion, or some such. That's definitely a topic more in the realm of theoretical physics than chemistry, but it's important not to give students the wrong idea here. Most great discoveries, quantum mechanics chief among them, came about exactly because people made a deliberate choice to not just "deal with it".

Meter:

--- Quote from: Corribus on September 27, 2020, 10:22:08 AM ---
--- Quote from: Meter on September 26, 2020, 08:27:43 PM ---This is wrong, however, as electrons are point-like and don't spin around an axis (like a globe or whatever). Rather they have intrinsic angular momentum, which is equally confusing, but the fact that it is intrinsic just means "deal with it, it exists".
--- End quote ---
There are certainly some things that must just be accepted as axiomatic by students of elementary chemistry and physics - and indeed, even from a seasoned chemist's view, some things need not be explained further - but it is unfair to say that science in general treats unexplained phenomena this way. There are reasonable and tested theories about why electron spin exists, despite their "pointlike" nature. I believe the current thinking involves virtual photon formation in the electric field generated by an electron in motion, or some such. That's definitely a topic more in the realm of theoretical physics than chemistry, but it's important not to give students the wrong idea here. Most great discoveries, quantum mechanics chief among them, came about exactly because people made a deliberate choice to not just "deal with it".

--- End quote ---
Physicists are notoriously unsatisfied with the idea of "that's just how things are", and thank lord for that! But as chemists (and chemistry students) there comes a point where we shouldn't look deeper and simply accept that certain phenomena are emergent properties of a deeper level of physics. Or maybe we should - but at that point you become more of a physicist than a chemist in my opinion.

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