I still don't get it. Why doesn't the electron fly into the proton?

>It actually is but at a very slow rate
It's not though. It's drifting away from the earth.

>Similarly the elctron is falling into the proton. They both fall in a spiral but the spiral for all intents and purposes looks like a circular orbit.
Holy fuck

is this some form of trolling? Have none of you heard about the weak nuclear force?

Why don't you elaborate.

>is this trolling
No way buddy youre on Veeky Forums no trolls here

The fuck has weak interaction have to do with helium atom.

>Well classically it's understood as the Coulomb attraction and centripetal force being equal.
>But that's classical, the modern understanding is that the electron has no definite position before measurement. On measurement the distribution of positions collapses to a single definite position, on average this position will be the Bohr radius. However there's a small, but non-zero, probability of it being found inside the radius of the proton.
If we consider that space is quantized, aren't these two explanations actually the same at such a small scale and such a high speed?

I think user is taking the name "electron capture" seriously.

I agree, as scientists we need to scientifically figure out why if an electron is negative and a proton is positive why don't they attract??!??!?

>If we consider that space is quantized
It's not. At least not outside some speculative theories.
>aren't these two explanations actually the same
No, they have two very different origins.
>at such a small scale
Even in theories with quantised space, that's still at least on the Planck scale, which is far smaller than qm.
>and such a high speed?
The energies involved here are actually pretty small.

You'll have to expand on your idea for me to address specifics though.

Oh wait you're right. The scale is definitely not small enough here, and even if it were, attributing the electron's lack of definite position to its speed would be implying that the electron is orbiting the proton faster than light, which is of course impossible.

I'm getting things all confused. What I was (mis)remembering was the idea that *energy* is quantized, *not* space. But that only explains the presence of discrete orbitals, not why the electrons' positions within those orbitals are probabilistic rather than following a continuous and predictable orbiting motion.

Hmm.

That brings me to another idea I recall having about this: is it possible that information, like other substances, has some maximum physical density? Maybe electrons' positions are probabilistic because an electron isn't large enough to contain complete information on its own motion. Its position would then become fixed when we observe it because we're "tilting the glass" and causing all the information to "accumulate on one side [or attribute, rather]."

BOUNDARY CONDITIONS
BOUNDARY CONDITIONS
BOUNDARY CONDITIONS

is everybody literally retarded here?

That's not how probability distributions work

Wow so many uneducated people here. SAGE!

>what is a neutron

I know right. Obviously this means the proton is flat

The simplest answer is that it has some amount of energy, and due to that energy, it has to move around.

The truth is that some electron orbits do have probability density in the nucleus, but it would just never be "absorbed" by it because of the types of interactions.

>That brings me to another idea I recall having about this: is it possible that information, like other substances, has some maximum physical density?

Yes.

Here's a stack exchange discussion on the topic.

physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2281/maximum-theoretical-data-density

Hey user.
What is the not-the-simplest answer?

It actually does.
The atom in your picture is hydrogen. The electron is in the 1s orbital. Like all s orbitals, its got a maximum inside the nucleus. Thing is, at any point, it can also be anywhere else inside the orbital because of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. And forget about the idea of electrons revolving around the nucleus, it's proven wrong and absolutely useless.

So the electron cloud is actually "touching" the proton and simply ends at the Bohr radius?

Neat.

next time anybody asks if there are any anons who study physics and made it past QM I'll just direct them to this thread and say clearly not

>so many wrong answers, posted as if they are correct and obvious

It doesn't end. The probability just gets very small. The probability cloud extends to infinity desu.

>s orbitals have a maximum inside the nucleus
nice try
No, the electron cloud never touches the proton because the proton isn't a "sphere" that can be touched.
Also it doesn't end at the Bohr radius, in fact the Bohr radius is the mean radius of an electron in the lowest energy orbital, so it's almost guaranteed to move outside of it. The probability density is an equation with respect to radius (inverse square I think, but it's been a while) so it just gets really small farther out.
This thread hurts.

Your graph shows the probability for the electron to be at a certain distance from the nucleus. Its got a minimum in the nucleus because thats the probability for the electron to be at a point vs on a sperical area that gets larger with the distance fom the nucleus. The actual electron density is the probability for the electron to be at a certain point (or volume element) in space and is highest inside the nucleus.

protip they are not >positive and negative breaking benjamin frank

protip they are not positive and negative breaking benjamin frank

>pos and negative

The real question is why the electron doesn't radiate its energy. Accelerating charges radiate electromagnetic waves which carry energy. The Rutherford model of hydrogen features an orbiting electron. Therefor it must accelerate, and it must radiate its energy away. This is obviously not what happens, so the Rutherford model must be wrong.

Instead we find that the energy exists within spherical harmonic solutions to the Schrodinger equation for a spherically symmetric coulomb potential.

It turns out that quantum mechanics models the structure of hydrogen better than any other. If you want a real answer to the question you need to bone up on quantum mechanics, and avoid the quackery on Veeky Forums.

I could be misunderstanding you here, but the most probable position for an electron is just [math] a_0 [/math]. The probability for an electron in a 1s orbital to be found within the nucleus is quite small, I make it to be something on the order of [math] P(r \leq r_p ) \approx 10^{-15} [/math]

>muh boundary conditions

How about explaining what physical phenomena causes boundary conditions? You can't. Regurgitate more.

you're plotting psi^2 * r^2. Obviously r^2 is going to go to zero. Just psi^2 is the actual electron density and 1s solutions to the hydrogen-like problem do infact have non-zero density at/in the proton.

Have you heard of inverse beta-decay?

Show me the exact calculation you're doing, because you've clearly misunderstood something here.
>you're plotting psi^2 * r^2.
Well if you want to find the expectation value of position you're going to have to calculate that. Likewise if you want to find the most probable position you're going to have to maximise [math] | \phi (x) |^2 [/math]. I really don't see how you've come to the conclusion that an electron is most likely to be found inside the nucleus. Sure it's PDF is a maximum at 0, but that doesn't mean it's most likely position is also 0.

a0 is not a position but a distance from the nucleus

most likely distance from nucleus is a0

most likely position is inside the nucleus

its not that hard to understand

so the weak force repels?

>Distance from the nucleus is not a position
Fuck off brainlet.

>a0 is not a position but a distance from the nucleus
Fucking retard.

Sweeties distance is a scalar, position is a vector.

>Hurr durr I think being pedantic means I smart
I ask myself each day why I still come back here.

>difference between a scalar and vector quantity is pedantry
back to

>distance is a scalar
Lmao, brainlets are adorable. They're synonyms dipshit.

>most likely position is inside the nucleus
Prove it.

They're actually homophones you literal giga brainlet

So you're just shitposting for the sake of it? Why?

Because you are?

>I still don't get it. Why doesn't the electron fly into the proton?

If it just flew into the proton then you;d know exactly where it is violating the uncertainty principle, it's actually a bit more complicated than that but that's pretty much the gist of it.

Because proton is actually flat and electron is hovering over it.

Dumb ass

>Why doesn't the electron fly into the proton?
Because electron is not a particle, it's a cloud

There is no such thing as one electron. Show me one, please. How do you detect one electron? How does it behave if we placed it in some kind of atomic cage?

If we truly valued Maxwell, we would understand that it is only reasonable to talk about charge density, or about fields.

Now however they be quantised is the true mystery. Apperently the proton is always some fixed sphere and the electron is some kind of spherical harmonic cloud around it, the result of the laplacian. Why cannot the proton be some blob, some kind of donut, aswell?

Saying the electron lies inside the orbit is equivalent to saying the e field around a proton follows the orbital shape.

>equilibrium

>pedantic
the difference between position and distance from the nucleus is exactly the point you mongoloid

My terrible understanding of it is that the uncertainty principle effectively acts similar to a like-charge repulsion. You can confine the electron to the nucleus, but then the momentum is going to be (probably) large enough to immediately escape.

How that actually works I have no idea. I suppose it's why people are saying an electron is not a "real" particle.

Every particle has uncertainty, including protons/neutrons. Their quantum locality is much more defined because they are composite particles (of quarks) with considerable mass.

ITT: Atomists who were blown out by the ancient Greeks thousands of years ago.

I still don't get it. Why doesn't the electron cloud eventually cause torrential downpours onto the proton?

It does. The ground and excited states are basically the water cycle. Increased quark buildup is akin to carbon emissions.

>>so many wrong answers, posted as if they are correct and obvious

This should be the new banner for Veeky Forums

>If we consider that space is quantized
Why would we do that?

It's classically understood that the Coulomb attraction and centrifugal force are equal* not centripetal force, centripetal force in this example is the coulomb attraction

Tidal forces are actually pulling the moon away from the earth. And by that I mean because the moon is past Geostationary orbit, it orbits slower than the Earth spins. So it is borrowing energy from the Earth's rotation via tidal forces and getting pulled along. This added energy speeds up the moon's orbital velocity, and this added velocity makes the moon fall further away from Earth.

Eventually the moon and Earth will be tidally locked though and then tidal forces will disappear and everything will be ok except the Sun is now slowly exploding.

Why do electron positron pairs always decay?

They don't, if one gets sucked into a black hole

Gravity

Why doesn't the moon fly into earth?

It does tho

I'm literally retarded, what happens if there are more Electron than Proton?

Then you have an ion.

Then why isn't Steel worth less???

That's what we should do. For other reasons, not basic QM, though. But, for example (four-)momentum representation being equivalent to (four-)position representation and Lorentz invariance. Put these together and see what you have.

stay in school

It has enough momentum so that when it enters the proton's gravitational dimple in spacetime, it begins orbiting it. If the electron was going slow enough, in theory it would just fall straight into the nucleus, but due to entropy we're pretty certain that an electron moving too slow would violate thermodynamics.

Electron and proton system (hydrogen atom) is more stable than their combination as a neutron and some form of energy

>Free neutron decay
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_neutron_decay
>Outside the nucleus, free neutrons are unstable and have a mean lifetime of about 14 minutes, 42 seconds

On the other hand electron capture is very unlikely, though it happens

The weird thing about this is for a free electron and free proton in space, there are only attractive forces between them
They should directly fall into each other on a straight line, provided there aren't much particles to sway them from the path

Therefore I think most the atoms formation happened when universe was a lot more denser and collisions were unpredictable

Currently, probably the neutron formation reactions are more frequent in the vast emptiness of space for rogue particles

Simply giving false information does not count as trolling.

this

Nah but it's still personally entertaining anyway. I once convinced someone that iguanas have milk, and that a drop of it is poisonous enough to kill an adult elephant.

thats also not the only problem with the rutherford model, it cant explain how atoms interact (chemical reactions etc.) and is pretty much useless

meant for

So is there no movement pattern at all? What about the wave-particle duality thingy, wasn't it established that that's applicable to electrons because they move that way or am I just wrong? Do they just appear at different points around the nucleus through tunneling or what??

The fact that we assume continuous probability density distribution of an electron.

Why would the fact that having more electrons than protons makes something an ion have anything to do with the price of steel?

I still dont get it. Why doesnt the earth fly into the sun?

It's forbidden by the uncertainty principle.

The more you constrain a particle's location, the more uncertain its momentum must be, therefore the larger its velocity can be, so there must be more energy available to it. Mathematically, there is a constant minimum for the product of each particle's uncertainty of position and uncertainty of momentum:
C

>the electron has very low mass (~1836 times that of the proton)
Oops... I meant the other way around, of course:
>the electron has very low mass (1/~1836 that of the proton)

A neutron, where electron and proton are unified in the proton core, is an unstable particle. The reason is that the neutron core itself is made up of positively and negatively charged particles, the forces accompanied by like charges being so close together are bigger in comparison to the electron hovering around the proton configuration. That is why the electron doesnt fly back into the proton, because it is repelled by the negative charge present in the core. (There are two negatively charged particles present in the neutron core, and one positive charge. A single positive charge can't repel itself).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron#Free_neutron_decay

tl;dr because it is energetically favourable for the electron to chill outside the core.

>Veeky Forums is not a reliable source of information.

That is absolutely wrong

best answer

mercury is liquid at RT but the 2 adjacent to it are not.

why? the valence 6s2 s-orbital electrons exhibit relativistic contraction, preventing them from forming strong intermolecular bonds.

the nucleus of mercury is large, and the valence electrons are poorly screened, feeling a larger charge from the nucleus. As a result, the electrons have to travel faster to prevent them from spiraling into the nucleus. They move up to 58% of the speed of light, which increases their mass significantly. Heavier electrons are attracted more to the nucleus than lighter ones, angular momentum causes them to move closer to the nucleus. As a result, the atom's radius shrinks and the valence electrons end up spending more time closer to the nucleus, making them less available for bonding other mercury atoms.

the reason why the electrons speed up rather than simply fall into the nucleus is because the energy levels are quantized, they are forbidden from doing so.

why are they forbidden? cause god most likely.

Ice made of lava!