What does an electron look like?
In school, you probably learned that an atom was like a small solar system with the nucleus as the sun and the electrons as the planets. The problem is that, as [The Action Lab] points out, the math tells us that if this simplistic model were correct, matter would be volatile. According to the video you can see below, the correct way to think of it is as a standing wave.
What does this mean? The video shows a very interesting demonstrator showing how it works. You can actually see standing waves in a ring of metal. It's an analog - not yet perfect - of how an atom works. An input frequency causes the ring to vibrate, and at specific vibration frequencies a standing wave develops in the ring.
What interested us the most is that this explanation shows why electrons only increase and decrease in steps. Turns out, nothing really revolves around how we all learned in school. Not that this model is exactly correct either, but it is apparently closer to the real thing than the old school model.
Electrons are one of those funny things that sometimes look like a wave and sometimes like a particle. Not that we've fully grasped all the quantum quirks. Maybe we half understand it and we don't half understand it.
In school, you probably learned that an atom was like a small solar system with the nucleus as the sun and the electrons as the planets. The problem is that, as [The Action Lab] points out, the math tells us that if this simplistic model were correct, matter would be volatile. According to the video you can see below, the correct way to think of it is as a standing wave.
What does this mean? The video shows a very interesting demonstrator showing how it works. You can actually see standing waves in a ring of metal. It's an analog - not yet perfect - of how an atom works. An input frequency causes the ring to vibrate, and at specific vibration frequencies a standing wave develops in the ring.
What interested us the most is that this explanation shows why electrons only increase and decrease in steps. Turns out, nothing really revolves around how we all learned in school. Not that this model is exactly correct either, but it is apparently closer to the real thing than the old school model.
Electrons are one of those funny things that sometimes look like a wave and sometimes like a particle. Not that we've fully grasped all the quantum quirks. Maybe we half understand it and we don't half understand it.
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