Path: csiph.com!weretis.net!feeder6.news.weretis.net!nntp.club.cc.cmu.edu!micro-heart-of-gold.mit.edu!newsswitch.lcs.mit.edu!nntp.TheWorld.com!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: moroney@world.std.spaamtrap.com (Michael Moroney) Newsgroups: sci.physics Subject: Re: Fastest Light Pulses Show Electrons Are Sluggish Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2016 14:56:35 +0000 (UTC) Organization: The World : www.TheWorld.com : Since 1989 Lines: 27 Message-ID: References: <4b2e512f-0a8d-425e-8473-74d7791fee62@googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: shell01.theworld.com X-Trace: pcls7.std.com 1454684195 22466 192.74.137.71 (5 Feb 2016 14:56:35 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@TheWorld.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2016 14:56:35 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: nn/6.6.5 Xref: csiph.com sci.physics:550674 john writes: >They don't orbit or move at all, hey Sam? >Cause otherwise it would take energy, hey Sam? >Schizo science!! Your mistake, once again, is thinking that the electron orbits the nucleus like the Earth orbits the sun, with a period of 100 attoseconds, or whatever that number was that you pulled out of your butt. Quantum Mechanics doesn't work like that. A planet orbiting its sun (or a little ball electron orbiting its bigger ball nucleus) has a definite position at any point in time, its location in some orbit. At the same time, it has a definite momentum, forward along its orbit. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle tells us we cannot know the uncertainty to more than a certain accuracy (hbar). For something as large as a planet, this is irrelevant. However, for an electron, if you try to nail down its position to a certain spot in some orbit, the uncertainty in its momentum, and therefore energy, will be huge, and you have no idea which way it is going or how fast, and it will likely have to have more energy than it needs to escape the atom. Similarly, if you constrain the momentum to be smaller than a certain number (so it doesn't have enough energy to escape), you won't know where the heck it is. Oh, you'll know it will be nearish the nucleus, this is what gives atoms their size, but you will have no idea where it is beyond that. The Bohr model has been dead for over 100 years. Get with 21st century science!