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
Catching King Salmon in the Arctic | Life Below Zero
She’s not even holding an equilibrium there. Let’s just give her a few minutes, but she’s definitely waking up. I think it’s going to be worth releasing. That’s good. Send her up river. Well, I’m glad we did that. She deserved it. Well, let’s go check ou…
Making inferences in informational texts | Reading | Khan Academy
[Music] From the moment she strolled into my office, I could tell she was gonna be a difficult sentence to read. You could tell from the way she walked that she was carrying a lot of information, but getting it out of her wouldn’t be easy. I was gonna nee…
ATP synthase | Cellular energetics | AP Biology | Khan Academy
In this video, we’re going to talk about what is arguably my favorite enzyme, and that is ATP synthase. You might be able to predict from its name what it does: it synthesizes ATP. Now, you’ve probably seen it before. We saw it when we looked at respirat…
Solving proportions 2 exercise examples | Algebra Basics | Khan Academy
[Instructor] We have the proportion ( x - 9 ) over ( 12 ) is equal to ( \frac{2}{3} ), and we wanna solve for the ( x ) that satisfies this proportion. Now, there’s a bunch of ways that you could do it. A lot of people, as soon as they see a proportion li…
Safari Live - Day 69 | Nat Geo WILD
Well hidden at the moment, tucked away in the long grass, and you can see that one of the little cubs is suckling away. So, these are the four cubs that we saw playing with the game drive blanket not all that long ago, tugging it backwards and forwards an…
How can we protect the polar regions and fight climate change? We went to Paris to find out
Well, I have made it to the city of love, and here is a crazy story for you. I’ve just been on a surfing trip; that’s why I’m dressed for the beach, not for Paris. A National Geographic called me and they said, “You need to cut your surfing trip short and…