yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Atomic Rant


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

[Applause]

Now it's time for me to get something off my chest. It's been bugging me since I was a little kid, so you may as well be my first victims. Now, all of you out there know what an atom looks like right? It looks like this.

So am I right? No, I'm wrong. That's called the Bohr-Sommerfeld atom. That's what an atom looked like back in the 1920s, and ever since the introduction of quantum mechanics towards the end of the 20s, that's been obsolete. It's 90 years old—it's ancient! And yet, people still think of this as the picture of the atom.

I prefer to think of this as the hula hoop atom. Now the thing that really bugs me is that corporations and even some research institutions, when they want to convince you that they're at the cutting edge, they go and stick a couple of these hula hoop atoms in their corporate logo.

It would be like Apple advertising their iPhone by showing you a candlestick telephone—it's crazy! What's a better way of representing the atom? Instead of these hula hoop orbits, you should think of the electrons as buzzing around the nucleus in a fuzzy little cloud—an electron cloud.

Have a look at this. So imagine we have this fuzzy spherical thing, a bit like that. We can chop it up into a whole bunch of pieces. We can chop it up into spherical bits called s orbitals, these more compact things called p orbitals, and these ring-like things that look like calamari that we call d orbitals.

So what do these orbitals mean? Basically, that fuzziness tells you the probability that there's an electron there because quantum mechanics says at any given moment we can't tell you exactly where an electron's going to be and what speed it's going. All we can do is calculate the probability that it's going to be in some point, the probability has a certain speed, and so on.

Those electron clouds represent that fuzzy probability. That's not the only way that you can chop up the electron cloud. What I showed you was typically the way that physicists do it. Chemists mathematically chop up their electron clouds using a different set of orbitals.

This is an s orbital—a spherical thing. This is a p orbital—a dumbbell-shaped orbital you have pointing in all sorts of directions. And here's a couple of examples of d orbitals.

So my advice to the marketing department of some great corporation that wants to show you how cutting edge they are, is that instead of using hula hoop atoms, they should include balloon animals in their corporate logos.

And I thank you for [Music] listening. Hey!

More Articles

View All
Ethology and animal behavior
In this video, we will begin to explore the field of ethology, which is the study of animal behavior. Animal behavior and the word itself, ethology, it has its roots in the Greek ethos. You also might be familiar with the word ethics. Ethos and ethics, yo…
TIL: These Birds Trick Others Into Raising Their Gigantic Kids | Today I Learned
[Music] Turns out there’s lots of different birds that don’t build nests at all. They only lay their eggs in other birds’ nests. This behavior is called brood parasitism, and a trick is you have to make an egg that looks like all the other eggs. Otherwise…
Why The $1 Electric Scooter Will TAKE OVER The World
And for all the young entrepreneurs out there, just realize that sometimes it’s the most simple ideas that often do the best. I think we have the natural tendency just to overcomplicate things because we believe the more complicated something is, the bett…
Interpreting change in exponential models: with manipulation | High School Math | Khan Academy
Ocean sunfishes are well known for rapidly gaining a lot of weight on a diet based on jellyfish. The relationship between the elapsed time ( t ) in days since an ocean sunfish is born and its mass ( m(t) ) in milligrams is modeled by the following functio…
Warren Buffett: 5 Life Changing Lessons School Never Taught You
But pick out the person you admire the most, the person that you’d change places with if you could, and then write down why you admire them. Just put it on a piece of paper. And then figure out the person that you would least like to change places with, w…
2015 AP Calculus BC 2b | AP Calculus BC solved exams | AP Calculus BC | Khan Academy
[Voiceover] Part b. “For zero is less than t is less than one, there is a point on the curve at which the line tangent to the curve has a slope of two.” The line tangent to the curve has a slope of two. “At what time is the object at that point?” So, the …