Atomic Rant

[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!