Nuclear Engineer Reacts to MinutePhysics "A Better Way to Picture Atoms"

I love this illustration. I would love to see a version that shows simple molecules like water or ammonia. A visualization of the bonds between atoms using this style of visual would be so cool

When I was in middle school, I’ve always assumed atoms were solid objects since everything that are made out of them are tangible. Then, I was introduced to quantum mechanics/physics…

I love the history of them trying to describe the electrons in the atomic structure. Bohr was the 'orbital model' and its only real power was showing that light could only emit certain wavelengths. But then people followed him in showing that the orbital model simply couldn't work because it'd bleed off energy and cause all electrons to fall into the nucleus. Right around then was Rutherfords experiments and the Milliken oil drop experiment. All the models that fell by the wayside in just a few years.

Recently found your channel and have consistently binged through them for the past week or so. Thank you so much for what you do, it’s nice to have a a reaction channel that genuinely adds to the original content ❤

One thing that needs to be added is that we only have these nice exact solutions for the hydrogen atom (and its isotopes). As soon as you add a second electron, there is no known way of obtaining exact solutions. So generally it is taught that heavier elements have their higher electrons in orbitals that look like the excited states of the H-atom, both for lack of a better alternative and because it is kinda-sorta right most of the time. With modern computers we could compute almost exact numerical approximations for how the electron density is distributed in multi-electron atoms, but it is still not widespread.

tyler your videos are so great

When I did O level chemistry in the 80s (age 16) I remember the Bohr model being as far as we went, with a little bit of hand waving about it not being 100% accurate, but it would suffice for most of the chemical reactions we'd encounter before A-level (age 18) or Year 1 undergrad (The 80s were a bit of a transitional time in British education - the year I took O Level maths was the first year that differentiation was on the O level paper, but my school didn't cover it, so there question in part 3 that no one had officially learned - answer 4 of 6 questions, but we had to do 4 from 5 since no one had a clue)

those blobs are just regions of above a certain magnitude according to some model close to spherical harmonics. if you think of them as regions around nodes in a way it makes mode sense. its not quite right but its close enough. the actual shapes just comes from a cutoff. when you do the probability calculus with quantum mechanics the probability isnt 0 anywhere so to get these shapes you just do some cutoff. for spherical harmonics you get nodes and antinodes in space this is just a representation of the structure of something like that, but for amplitudes.

our interests line up so well

I was alright with the blobs. But these are so much better.

I honestly really struggled with trying to understand electron orbitals and what they meant, so I can definitely relate.

I recommend "Tex Talks History: The Greatest Con in early Aviation - The Dr. Christmas Story" by The Black Pants Legion. Kinda fitting with the season.

When I thought about it in high school, I thought that since particles were waves, you could have standing waves of electrical energy or something. I didn’t have any idea of motion, though. It’s like I thought that the electron was randomly changing position within the cloud so quickly it, in a way, didn’t have travel time. Like it was constantly “quantum leaping” around in the zones shown by the orbital shapes. Now I think of electron orbitals as standing waves of probability density is fascinating. But it still feels like a superposition of most likely positions without conveying the momenta.

I always thought atoms were just small balls lol

I remember doing this in calc 1 at university. Didn’t have to animate it though!

This literally made it click in my brain how atoms work. It makes sense. First time I understand how to conceptualize their "shapes," knowing the drawings were inaccurate. That being said, smart people have used various techniques to attempt to photograph atoms - I believe we're pretty close to getting actual sharp images of some of them, either by energizing them to make them glow, or by photographing their shadows. Maybe that could be a topic for a future video!

Minutephysics! Been following Henry for about a decade, he’s great!

Cool. Thanks for sharing.

Note that all these illustrations are for only 1 electron in hydrogen atom. In other atoms, when you have many electrons, they affect wave functions of each other. You can't just put one probability distribution on top of another. I actually visualized orbitals in same way, but like clouds. Denser is for higher probability. I can fly in my mind through these clouds. But I'm not sure that I came to this picture during university course. I guess I got it later, studying independently. But visualizing flow of wave function is new for me. Didn't think about it. I also remember that in school chemistry when they teach orbitals and their hybridization, they actually seed a lot of misconceptions. It also beneficial to understand that all this clouds are formed because of standing wave(this is exactly the idea of Bohr before quantum mechanics). People are familiar with standing waves in everyday life. So if you have a circular string around nuclei, standing vibrations will give you idea how dumbbell and other shapes appear. Rainbow colors of orbitals is usually wave function phase visualization. 0 is red 2 pi is blue. If you see that colors repeats, phase makes more than 2 pi rotations when you go around an orbital. Usually it happens for non-zero orbital angular momentum. Number of repeating in phase rotations is equal to orbital angular momentum.

I mostly studied chemistry by myself because I had to so it to get into university for molecular biology bachelor's programme. In high school the orbitals were just touched upon and not really explained that indepth. Even in university most lecturers did a lousy job explaining them. But luckily I had Khan Academy and MinutePhysics. Orbitals come up quite a bit in my masters studies in biochemistry and structural biology. Especially with regards to protein imaging techniques.