Kind: captions
Language: en
[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 boss sommerfeld atam that's
what an atam 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 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 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 comp at
things called P orbitals and these ring
like these things that look like
calamari that we call D
orbitals so what are 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 is going to
be in some point the probability has a
certain speed and so on and 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 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