Three years
I just realized that as of the 23rd of this month, I had been blogging for 3 years. Three, coincidentally, is also the number of people who read this blog. Counting me.
Something cool: a movie of an electron riding a light wave.
A short blurb that (barely) explains what you see in the movie is here.
Something that I find really interesting is that the durations of light pulses used to make this are shorter than the time it would take an electron to (classically) circle the nucleus in a hydrogen atom. Attoseconds are 10-18seconds. I haven't checked the math, but I think that I read that an attosecond is to a second as a second is to the age of the universe. It makes 3 years of blogging seem kind of inconsequential, really.
posted by Robin St. John @ 10:51 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
If you're interested in this stuff, look at "And Yet It Moves" by Mark P. Silverman -- particularly chapter 3 of the same name. I recall hearng that, given the and the energy and size of the 1 s orbital of a heavy atom and the mass of an electron, relativistic corrections needed to be made for the 'motion of the electron'. Of course the whole notion of an electron trajectory is incompatible with a node in the probability distribution (e.g. a 2 s orbital). Silverman also discusses this in the same chapter.
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