> The increased nuclear mass causes orbiting electrons to speed up to a significant fraction of the speed of light, where the rules of Einstein’s theory of relativity are important.
> In the relativistic regime, an electron’s spin — the magnetic moment that points either up or down — and the electron’s orbit are no longer independent of each other, a state known as spin-orbit coupling.
Interesting stuff. I've never heard of sigma or pi bonds.
Sigma and Pi bonds are typically covered in AP Chemistry, even if the “why/how” is hand waved pretty heavily. The valence cloud shapes get wild for heavier atoms and bonds between two or more atoms add even more to the mix.
I had incredible difficulties with Chemistry, more than any other subject, because most everything was hand waved away, requiring mostly rote memorization. I could never get an intuitive understanding, partly because my profs seemingly refusing to think about things from a physics perspective. My physics prof was able to help with some of it. It was very odd.
If I would have stuck with it, would things have improved?
I don't know, I'm not very chemical, but fwiw: a friend and I were favorably impressed with Linus Pauling's general chemistry textbook. It tries to supply enough of the physics for the chemistry to make sense. We only studied for a few weeks before moving on, though, and it's a big fat book.
that's because chemistry is heavily involved in describing the nature of how elements and molecules interact with each other. There has to be some element of understanding that nothing is quite as clear because we use experiments and their conclusions to slowly but surely eliminate some theories while keeping others until disproven.
The physics that predicts chemistry is about 100 years old. Almost nothing people study up to high-school is that recent, and that modern physics tends to be really hard.
Yes but ... after a few not so mild assumptions, it takes exponential time to solve it. In this case, you need 6 electrons in 2x5 orbitals for the Carbon and 82 electrons and 2x43 orbitals for Bismuth- (perhaps more, I usually work with lighter atom). So now the free parameter are Combinatoric(96,88)~=3E13 and you must construct a matrix of [3E13 x 3E13] and then find the minimal eigenvalue. So you must make a lot of simplifications and more assumptions to get the result before the universe dies.
And this is for a very cold isolated molecule like in this experiment. If you have many moving molecules surrounded by a lot of water molecules at a usual room temperature, it gets much much much worse.
More or less, but it is profoundly computationally intractable even in relatively trivial cases. Trying to do this was one of the earliest use cases for supercomputers. It is genuinely a “boiling the ocean” type problem.
Practical attempts use a lot of heuristics and approximations, which risks fidelity.
As said before, the physics for chemistry is 100 years old (Schrödinger/Dirac), but the N-body Hamiltonian is an exponential beast. Scaling to just 1mg (~10¹⁹ particles) hits the "Exponential Wall."
Not in undergraduate chemistry at least. Maybe chem majors had it different. Organic chemistry 1 was basically rote memorization of various reactions and catalysts and their required conditions. Exam questions would be some organic molecule start and some organic molecule end result and you'd have to draw out each and every intermediary step to get to that end result. Organic chemistry 2 was exactly the same just more reactions to memorize. Biochem was a little easier since the exams didn't ask for full pathways but still pretty much pure memorization.
I hated these sorts off classes, where if you had your notes with you, you'd ace the exam and be able to explain everything. Passing or failing depended not on understanding, but simply whether you cram all the specifics and covered edge cases all into your head at once, given the rest of your present courseload preventing you from actually digging in to the best you could. Wrong answers didn't come from not knowing how to solve something, but not remembering exactly how to solve something.
You had a poor organic course. Even orgo 1 should have you thinking about resonance + electron-rich or -deficient areas of molecules and how those lead to reactions.
Of course we talked about those. But if you went off only those you'd miss the edge cases and gotchas the prof laid for you in step 8 of the synthesis. Couldn't get around just doing worksheet after worksheet after worksheet of reactions to try and drive it into your head. Going to office hours to beg for more practice reactions. Everyone scheduled the rest of their major around when they would have to take ochem to make sure the rest of it was as light as possible. Uncurved class averages would be in the 50s.
You understand it well enough for the real world use cases where you can say simply look up what conditions a particular rarely used catalyst might run at. No issues confusing it with another catalyst in your head in the real world.
I think this lines up with my experience. The way chemistry is often taught its very abstract, borderline magical.
I also had an amazing physics professor who was able to tie literally everything we learned back to real practical and observable events. There is an art to teaching these subjects. This is all undergrad level though, and it wasn’t my major.
At upper undergrad and grad levels, it probably would have improved a lot. The issue is that a lot of the why requires quantum mechanics to really explain and even that becomes intractable extremely quickly. Like you can probably do the analytic solutions for hydrogen atoms and electrons but once you get to helium or past that, you basically need to use a computer to do numeric calculations and even there, you are very quickly using approximations instead of solving the quantum equations directly.
And also emergent behavior means that at each level, we need different abstractions to deal with the problem. Even with chemistry, there's ideas like benzene rings that are aromatic, you couldn't predict that from particle-particle interactions. So it's not just that it's hard to understand quantum mechanics, it's that understanding QM doesn't mean you'll understand the problems that chemistry deals with.
I don't think that's quite right. We only have to worry about emergent behavior precisely because running a full simulation is intractable. If we could "just" run full QM instead of MD with all those lossy force field approximations all the emergent behavior would happen on its own. But obviously doing that is well past science fiction and into the territory of wild fantasy.
I think misconceptions commonly arise because there are so many examples where we know how to simulate each part with arbitrary precision but the scale of the system is where it all falls over. That just doesn't match up with our everyday experiences because systems on the scale of avagadros number and O(n^7) algorithms are anything but typical.
Yes and no. If we could "just" run full QM, there's still the issue of building abstractions regarding the emergent behavior. A full system is still useless if you can't describe things like ligands, carbon rings, etc. So regardless of whether we can simulate it, we still need terms for higher level concepts.
But yes, nano and even femtosecond level second stuff is pretty mind bending.
Yes its like cooking or music. You start just by learning whats in the kitchen and on repeating steps. This creates latent or tacit knowledge that helps with the Why questions down the road.
Chemistry is very empirical. While we today can explain nearly everything from physics, you still always have check how things will work in experiment, unlike in physic where you often can calculate the outcome of experiments very precisely from first principles.
To not have to resort to rote memorization you first have to have the interest. That way you accumulate the knowledge over time, then the patterns feel logical at some point. The logic isn't very precise, maybe that's where you have problems? Some molecules are similar in some molecules in this regard and other molecules in another regard. You will get a feel how stuff behaves. You certainly have a lot of chemistry knowledge you are not aware of.
For example, I'm sure you have a good intuition how things burn and you probably know the basics of why it burns. The invisible oxygen in the air is the main chemical insight to explain why stuff burns. You can explain the whole process to whatever detail you like with physics, but many chemists lack the math and physics knowledge to do much of that.
“Physical chemistry” is the search term for what you’d be interested in.
General physics and chemistry take different approaches forced by the subject matter. Physics abstracts to problems over concepts with details abstracted away, but at higher levels of education you learn to apply these corrections.
Chemistry starts with practical reality and a lot of rote memorization. Only at the higher levels do you get the unifying theory. Since the unifying theory is quantum electrodynamics (in this case, relativistic QED), that makes sense.
I hated chemistry in school as well for the same reason. I studied physics afterwards... Oddly, once I was looking for information about some experimental physics problem with electron orbitals and found some very well-written theoretical chemistry lecture notes :P
I have a B.Sc in Chemistry (Honours) from late 1980s and it was not until the final year that things finally began to click. The main catalysts were the books "Concise Inorganic Chemistry by J.D.Lee" and "Mechanism in Organic Chemistry by Peter Sykes". Both beautifully written and try to give a framework within which to think viz. the former based on the periodic table and the latter on carbon valence bond properties. I think i need to revisit these (and other books) to justify my degree in Chemistry :-)
I had the same issue! I absolutely destroyed AP Physics (first person in the history of the school to get a 5 on the AP and 100 on the NYS Regents) but got a D in AP Chem one semester, my lowest grade ever!!
One of the disappointing realisations I got from my physics degree was that as you move into the real world with non-spherical cows you can no longer solve any of the equations.
The wild thing is that the understanding of electron arrangement made a _huge_ difference in chemistry texts where overnight they went from myriad descriptions of reactions being commented as "...and this is not well understood" to quite thorough and rigorous explanations of chemical interactions.
Chemistry fundamentally is about producing a result. Physics, especially when you get into particles, is about explaining a result. Ultimately, chemistry, electronics,even civil engineering, is applied physics, but we are a long way from consolidating and closing the gaps. Empirical results stand in for complete understanding in the vast majority of engineering disciplines, both because complete understanding is not needed and also because we don’t have it yet. Fundamentally, chemistry is a variety of engineering discipline, being mostly an applied science.
> Exclusion Statement: Molecular orbital theory is
recommended as a way to provide deeper insight
into bonding. However, the AP Exam will neither
explicitly assess molecular orbital diagrams,
filling of molecular orbitals, nor the distinction
between bonding, nonbonding, and antibonding
orbitals.
Furthermore, this kind of orbital theory is usually taught in organic chemistry and then inorganic for those who take that in college. AP chem targets "gen chem" which is not talking about orbitals on that level at all, and I'm familiar with gen chem as taught at least in 3 universities, none touched molecular orbital. If someone were to teach orbital theory in general chemistry, it would be a lot of hand waving and not much actual mathematics which was the point of the original comment. To cover molecular orbital theory is satisfactorily. You need to know quite a bit of the mathematics behind differential equations and statistical mechanics etc. AP chem isn't going to cover this. But maybe you're differential geometry class in 9th grade did ;))
I also took it 20 years ago but I feel like they were (of course I also did undergrad chem 16 years ago so I may be conflating things). It's difficult to explain isomers without explaining why multiple bonds don't rotate.
Not in the sense that the electrons would be orbiting "outside" the star. Neutron stars are already a conglomeration of particles, including a sizeable fraction electrons that are effectively "squeezed out" of neutrons to have equivalent fermi energies. Any additional charge you add would get immediately shielded by those unbound particles instead of creating an "orbit".
As written that sentence is wrong. The increased nuclear mass is not the cause of the effects. It's the increase in the nuclear charge and subsequent modification of the coulomb potential that is relevant.
Relativity is also responsible for a lot of weird behaviors of heavy elements, such as the color of gold. Or that lead is a good material for batteries.
Wait... wasn't it already understood that relativity influences electron orbits of heavy elements? I clearly remember being taught some of this in physics, in the mid-noughties.
For instance, we know that gold gets its color from relativistic effects.
Seems to be the first time this was confirmed via direct experimental observation of the orbitals:
“This idea that relativity is important in heavy elements has been around since the 1970s,” said Lai-Sheng Wang, a professor of chemistry at Brown and the study’s corresponding author. “But we show direct spectroscopic evidence that what we learned in high school about chemical bonding isn’t true in heavy elements."
I don’t understand how something that has no clearly defined position like an electron can have a well defined speed. I thought I had understood that at that level, particles are more like clouds, or vibrations in the quantum field, and they had no well defined position until you tried to measure it, causing its cloud to collapse to a smaller region. But if non observed electrons can have a speed that defines the color of a material, that whole understanding seems to be wrong! Where is the error? Are all atoms on a piece of gold being “observed” in the quantum sense?? Even if we just capture the spectrum? Or it’s something else??
The idea is that it has not a clearly definite position, but it has a distribution of probability to find it that looks like a "cloud" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital
In a more abstract sense, has not a clearly definite speed, but it has a distribution of probability to find it in a speed graphic.
The distribution of position and speed are defined by an equation and you must add a relativistic correction to the classic version. For lighter atoms you can just ignore the correction. For heavy atom (like Bismuth in this case) the correction is important.
Informally, the correction is important only when the "average" speed is fast enough to be somewhat close to the speed of light, like 50%c.
The correction changes the energy of the expected distribution of position and speed, and the energy. When an electron jumps from an orbital to another orbital, the difference of energies is related to the color.
> Are all atoms on a piece of gold being “observed” in the quantum sense??
[Ignoring that "observer" is a very misleading word and causes a lot of confusion, but it's the standard one and we are stick with it...]
The observation is only of the energy level of the orbital electron. We know the energy, but we don't know the position or the speed. When you observe some quantum object you don't get magically all the properties, only one of them, in this case the energy. In other experiments you can get only the position, in others only the speed. [And there are a lot of weird cases and technical details.]
(Newbie here). And then going further, shouldn't there also be acceleration and its distribution? It says classical models could not explain why accelerating electrons were not radiating. If acceleration also shows up in QM, then ... a distribution of radiation?
[Sorry for the delay. I really had to watch that soccer game and kids don't have school on Sunday.]
There is an acceleration distribution, but the acceleration operator is strange. I don't remember the details and a quick google search confirms that it's strange.
It's complicated... let's oversimplify some details...
In QM the electron must jump from one orbital to another, and the difference in energy is emitted as radiation as a photon. If the electron jumps from A to B, then B must be empty. So if A is the orbital with less energy then it can't emit. Also if B is full, it can't emit.
For a big enough system, there are plenty of options for B and you get a very good approximation that is the classic rule that says that accelerating electrons emit photons.
There are weird cases, like in a neutron star, there are too many electrons trapped by gravity so all possible B are full, and you have electrons that can't emit.
It you want a tabletop experiment, the keyword is "fermion gas" that are gas of fermions (like electrons) that are very cold and very dense and they have a strange repulsion that is not explained classically. It is caused because there are jumps that are forbidden because the destination is full. (If you heat them or give them more room to be diluted, this strange repulsion almost disappears and you can aproximarte them as a classical gas.)
> a distribution of radiation?
If you measure the radiation far away, you have a distribution of possible colors/energy of the photon, because the electron may choose to jump form A to B1, B2, B3, ... This is like the lines color of gas lamps.
If you measure close enough, you have to draw Feynman diagrams and the photons may have a slightly different value of color/energy. But it's complicated and I'm not sure of the details. I guess it's related to the acceleration distribution, but I'm not sure of the details again.
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The easy answer is that "acceleration -> radiation" is only a useful approximation when the system is big enough to ignore the quantum effect.
The hard answer is probably that you have to study like 10 years of physics to be sure and explain me the details. :)
"High speed" here can be taken in terms like this: the phase of the wave function changes rapidly with position and time. (Changing with position -> a superposition that's heavy on short wavelengths, high momentum; with time -> high frequency, high energy.)
Re "observed all the time": when gold interacts with light, the light's normally of a strength that's a small perturbation on the fields internal to the atom, which is basically why you can treat the atom/light-field system as two coupled quantum systems. It's an "observation" when the light leaves a classical trace such as a current in a CCD.
(I don't expect this to leave you unmystified about QM, but hopefully a bit clearer about it.)
The Dirac equation which is the equation for describing the wavelike behavior of electrons. It predicted the existence of antimatter and particle spin.
You start with the Schrödinger equation, add relativity to get the Klein-Gordon equation which is a mess because it's second order in time involving negative probabilities, if you in ways "take the square root" of it you get the Dirac equation.
Relativity has been part of the understanding of electrons since 1928.
To add to this, this "square root" operation done to derive the Dirac equation is where spinors i.e. electron spin i.e. the Pauli exclusion principle i.e. the reason atoms exist at all comes from. Likewise antimatter. The "second order in time" of the Klein-Gordon equation comes from adding relativity and the "fix" reducing that to first order time is the source of antimatter and spin.
So yes very much so relativistic effects are a foundational part of QM.
Thanks for the insights. I am interested in learning all this stuff. Am currently going though just Schrodinger's Equation. Do you have book recommendation(s) that include insights everywhere just like what you shared? Thanks.
These are books to train physicists, accessable-ish to a math heavy engineering undergraduate degree holder. The insights above are my own and extractable from this material but not necessarily stated out loud (unless I'm unconsciously plagiarizing which is entirely possible)
* David Griffiths - Introduction to Elementary Particles
* Chris Quigg - Gauge Theories of the Strong, Weak, and Electromagnetic Interactions
In general, yes. Spin-orbit coupling and relativistic effects in heavier elements is not new. A rather... significant elements where this was studied was uranium (and plutonium, of course). Even napkin maths show that for heavy elements, some of the electrons have relativistic velocities.
This discovery is about a (seemingly, I haven't been keeping up too much) new case of one specific bond in one specific ion. Do not read the university's breathless press release, go straight to the article. The third sentence of the editor's summary is "It’s long been clear that this model starts to fray when the atoms get heavy enough for relativity to come into play".
Yes, I was taught that relativity is a significant part of quantum chemistry equations in gold atoms 25 years ago. The idea is quite old and the title is misleading.
subheader explains the article in case you were wondering
> Researchers have shown the first direct experimental evidence that the textbook triple bond structure breaks down in heavy elements, where relativity makes the rules.
I had a couple drinks so having one of those moments. I am always so fascinated by the science and experiments done to prove what we know. I consider myself at least of average intelligence probably slightly above but the things scientists research and solve always blows me away.
My guess to the Fermi paradox is that there actually are intelligent life across the universe but just like in Star Trek they stay quiet until we reach a certain level of knowledge.
Very farsighted, after working as a patent clerk, to lay claim on such a foundational technology. Back in the day, they must've been like, oh, so Mercury blocks the sun at the wrong time, but where's the commercial value - and now every chemical company throughout the universe is about to get a bill every time they make something more complex than hydrogen gas.
Meanwhile, Galilean relativity has long gone out of patent, and people on board planes and other vehicles just move around like they were in a stationary reference frame paying no royalties.
In general, anything that is observed to be true at a smaller scale or context can't be extended to much larger scales. That involves assumptions on logic and mathematics to be homogenous across all scales. A pure theoretical extrapolation without bounds is quite common in mathematics, such as proof by induction etc.
Also, the foundational axioms of logic themselves could be valid only at a scale that is familiar to humans. For example, the strict bounday between true and false might get blurred and things could be true and false at the same time at other scale.
> things could be true and false at the same time at other scale.
Being true and false at the same time is a contradiction. There is such a thing as mathematical intuitionism that rejects the rule of excluded middle, but it has nothing to do with grandiose generalizations.
Can equivalent theoretical predictions be calculated in a Bohmian framework for the quantum aspects, or is this (potentially) an interesting case where there’s divergence and falsifiability?
Bohmian mechanics is nonrelativistic, so it has been "falsified" since its inception. It generally makes identical predictions to nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (i.e. the Schrödinger equation), but finding a relativistic version, equivalent to the Dirac equation in QM, has been difficult due to the nonlocality of the pilot wave.
He was a very proud Jew, who questioned whether he would have been had he not been born into such life. I disagree immensely with him on his pure-fatalism POV, but obviously everybody reading this knows his last name more than anyelse's [& definitely not mine].
----
I have a degree in medicinal chemistry, back from the ancient mid-00s (pre Youtube) and just cannot imagine how incredible science education is/could_be with all the modern visual aids [†]. That models for every single element are just a click away and highly interactive, within any online web_browser (and without additional softwares).
Old is new again. Thanks Einstein. I cannot even begin to imagine just how far ahead his own brain was processing this complexity.
[†] Back then I was still doing organic chemistry rotations entirely within my own spatial cortex, because the only visuals were 2D prints in the library. Somehow earned 'A's {thanks brain}.
"Bismuth could be an alternative to toxic lead in next-generation solar cells."
Is lead still used in common, mass-produced solar panels currently on the market? Wikipedia:
"Lead-based semiconductors such as lead telluride and lead selenide are used in photovoltaic cells and infrared detectors."
Wiki page for lead telluride mentions thermo-electric materials, page for lead selenide mentions IR imaging & detectors. Neither page even mentions solar panels.
Searching turns up mentions of use in flexible solar panels, which have a tiny market share. And iirc some/most of those use cadmium rather than lead compounds? (ok cadmium is equally nasty)
There's mention of lead solders used in solar panel construction. Leaded solders have been banned in EU due to its RoHS directive for a looong time, spare a few niche applications. Solar panels among those? If ever: still the case in 2026?
True: bismuth is used in some solders for similar reasons as lead.
And ofcourse there's recycling. One source mentioned ~0.1% of recycled panels by weight. Another source says overall lead content lower-level than safety limits for material on children's playgrounds.
All in all, that "toxic lead" statement reads more like outdated info. If not FUD.
> The increased nuclear mass causes orbiting electrons to speed up to a significant fraction of the speed of light, where the rules of Einstein’s theory of relativity are important.
Fun fact: this is why mercury is liquid at room temperature. Its inner electrons move at close to 60% the speed of light, pulling in its outer electrons more tightly, making it harder for it to bond and be solid. (I am not a physicist, don't rely on my statements for your space ship design)
Relativistic effects are observed with many other 6th and 7th period elements. For example, the yellow colour of gold and caesium comes from altered electron energy levels due to relativistic orbital contraction, so are the special catalytic and bonding properties of platinum.
OP claimed relativistic effects explain why mercury is liquid at room temperature. That may be part of the story, but it isn't the whole thing, since other heavy elements are not liquid at room temperature.
Explaining relativistic effects in plain text forums to a general audience is a big ask, but here is a link to the first study[0] that gave evidence but it has long expected.
That still doesn't answer why these relativistic effects don't cause neighbouring elements to be liquid. Electron velocities should be quite similar for them. There must be something apart from relativistic effects that makes mercury special in that regard.
Gold is right next door, relativistic effects shrink both Gold and Mercury’s 6s orbitals.
In gold it changes the color, in Mercury it changes freezing temperature.
Gallium has a low melting point 29.76C but that is due to unique chemical bonding.
"relativistic contraction" (shrinking of s and p orbitals) and "relativistic expansion" (destabilization of d and f orbitals) causes many observed phenomena.
Relativistic contraction of the 6s orbital and expansion of the 5d orbital lower the energy required to excite electrons. Consequently, gold absorbs blue light.
Strong relativistic contraction of the outer 6s electrons leaves them tightly bound and unavailable for metallic bonding. This results in incredibly weak atomic interactions, thus mercury a liquid at room temperature.
Lead also has 6s, which is what makes lead acid batteries work as well as they do.
So while the observed effects change, there are relativity effects with several nearby neighbors.
It would be the element underneath it which is synthetic. But it is interesting that all the elements in that row are soft or brittle in pre form or in some compounds.
It also has an effect, it is a small correction in the energies and bounding. Sometimes it's enough to change the color or state, sometimes it's a correction like making it 1% softer or harder and is not interesting unless you are a specialist.
Thanks for the link to the paper published in 2010 (16 years) ago. The OP article from Brown reads as if they were the first to establish importance of Special Relativity for heavy atoms which is not true.
If the spatial extent of the proton is not infinite, this would imply that the charged quarks making up the proton are accelerating. Why aren't these quarks then emitting electromagnetic radiation, thus slowing down? I thought electrons were essentially standing waves around the nucleus, and thus not accelerating. Maybe there is a good youtube video explainer?
Quarks don't have quantum energy states to transition between, hence they aren't subject to radiating photons due to acceleration.
Similar to why the electron in a hydrogen atom doesn't keep emitting radiation and crash into the nucleus once it reaches its ground state... there's no lower state for it to jump to.
A traditional explanation with Relativity says: Sound is compression waves through a medium, and radio is electromagnetic waves through no medium, and light is photon waves through no medium but gravity due to mass attraction changes the paths of the massless photon particles transiting through spacetime in a vacuum at c the max speed of light and photonic causation.
(But is there spooky action at a distance faster than c that's more than chance correlation?)
Superfluid Quantum Gravity (SQG) and Superfluid Vacuum Theory (SVT) say that the vacuum of space is not nothing; at Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) phases of matter, there is a new description of the particles in space. And there should be, because really what is between atoms and electrons in the nothingness of the vacuum of space at what altitude and temperature?
And so to describe the path of massive photons and standard massless photons through the superfluid of space, additional or alternate or sufficient superset mechanics to describe dilatant fluid model of spacetime at macro and micro and particle scales.
Is it Proca fields for massive photons with Airy-beam-like curvature?
/?hnlog Ctrl-F dilatant; dilatant quantum fluid model of gravity :
- > How to test whether MHD or SQR [or SQG or SVT] best explain the given phenomena?
Where are the PROOFS? Show the EVIDENCE, or go home!
No one cares about an other self declared "expert" who is preaching about quantum gravity without having any grasp on the subject.
> and radio is electromagnetic waves through no medium, and light is photon waves through no medium but gravity due to mass attraction changes the paths of the massless photon particles transiting through spacetime in a vacuum at c the max speed of light and photonic causation.
124 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 65.7 ms ] thread> In the relativistic regime, an electron’s spin — the magnetic moment that points either up or down — and the electron’s orbit are no longer independent of each other, a state known as spin-orbit coupling.
Interesting stuff. I've never heard of sigma or pi bonds.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aei1285
If I would have stuck with it, would things have improved?
Do we have this?
And this is for a very cold isolated molecule like in this experiment. If you have many moving molecules surrounded by a lot of water molecules at a usual room temperature, it gets much much much worse.
Practical attempts use a lot of heuristics and approximations, which risks fidelity.
I hated these sorts off classes, where if you had your notes with you, you'd ace the exam and be able to explain everything. Passing or failing depended not on understanding, but simply whether you cram all the specifics and covered edge cases all into your head at once, given the rest of your present courseload preventing you from actually digging in to the best you could. Wrong answers didn't come from not knowing how to solve something, but not remembering exactly how to solve something.
I also had an amazing physics professor who was able to tie literally everything we learned back to real practical and observable events. There is an art to teaching these subjects. This is all undergrad level though, and it wasn’t my major.
I think misconceptions commonly arise because there are so many examples where we know how to simulate each part with arbitrary precision but the scale of the system is where it all falls over. That just doesn't match up with our everyday experiences because systems on the scale of avagadros number and O(n^7) algorithms are anything but typical.
But yes, nano and even femtosecond level second stuff is pretty mind bending.
To not have to resort to rote memorization you first have to have the interest. That way you accumulate the knowledge over time, then the patterns feel logical at some point. The logic isn't very precise, maybe that's where you have problems? Some molecules are similar in some molecules in this regard and other molecules in another regard. You will get a feel how stuff behaves. You certainly have a lot of chemistry knowledge you are not aware of.
For example, I'm sure you have a good intuition how things burn and you probably know the basics of why it burns. The invisible oxygen in the air is the main chemical insight to explain why stuff burns. You can explain the whole process to whatever detail you like with physics, but many chemists lack the math and physics knowledge to do much of that.
General physics and chemistry take different approaches forced by the subject matter. Physics abstracts to problems over concepts with details abstracted away, but at higher levels of education you learn to apply these corrections.
Chemistry starts with practical reality and a lot of rote memorization. Only at the higher levels do you get the unifying theory. Since the unifying theory is quantum electrodynamics (in this case, relativistic QED), that makes sense.
I have a B.Sc in Chemistry (Honours) from late 1980s and it was not until the final year that things finally began to click. The main catalysts were the books "Concise Inorganic Chemistry by J.D.Lee" and "Mechanism in Organic Chemistry by Peter Sykes". Both beautifully written and try to give a framework within which to think viz. the former based on the periodic table and the latter on carbon valence bond properties. I think i need to revisit these (and other books) to justify my degree in Chemistry :-)
For background and inspiration, consult Linus Pauling's classics; The Nature of the Chemical Bond and General Chemistry - https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Pauling+Linus%...
> Exclusion Statement: Molecular orbital theory is recommended as a way to provide deeper insight into bonding. However, the AP Exam will neither explicitly assess molecular orbital diagrams, filling of molecular orbitals, nor the distinction between bonding, nonbonding, and antibonding orbitals.
Furthermore, this kind of orbital theory is usually taught in organic chemistry and then inorganic for those who take that in college. AP chem targets "gen chem" which is not talking about orbitals on that level at all, and I'm familiar with gen chem as taught at least in 3 universities, none touched molecular orbital. If someone were to teach orbital theory in general chemistry, it would be a lot of hand waving and not much actual mathematics which was the point of the original comment. To cover molecular orbital theory is satisfactorily. You need to know quite a bit of the mathematics behind differential equations and statistical mechanics etc. AP chem isn't going to cover this. But maybe you're differential geometry class in 9th grade did ;))
Very cool.
The paper PDF: https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.brown.edu/dist/0/196/fil...
For instance, we know that gold gets its color from relativistic effects.
https://physics.aps.org/articles/v10/s3
I'm so happy we have HN with likeminded people and no noise.
The idea is that it has not a clearly definite position, but it has a distribution of probability to find it that looks like a "cloud" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital
In a more abstract sense, has not a clearly definite speed, but it has a distribution of probability to find it in a speed graphic.
The distribution of position and speed are defined by an equation and you must add a relativistic correction to the classic version. For lighter atoms you can just ignore the correction. For heavy atom (like Bismuth in this case) the correction is important.
Informally, the correction is important only when the "average" speed is fast enough to be somewhat close to the speed of light, like 50%c.
The correction changes the energy of the expected distribution of position and speed, and the energy. When an electron jumps from an orbital to another orbital, the difference of energies is related to the color.
> Are all atoms on a piece of gold being “observed” in the quantum sense??
[Ignoring that "observer" is a very misleading word and causes a lot of confusion, but it's the standard one and we are stick with it...]
The observation is only of the energy level of the orbital electron. We know the energy, but we don't know the position or the speed. When you observe some quantum object you don't get magically all the properties, only one of them, in this case the energy. In other experiments you can get only the position, in others only the speed. [And there are a lot of weird cases and technical details.]
There is an acceleration distribution, but the acceleration operator is strange. I don't remember the details and a quick google search confirms that it's strange.
It's complicated... let's oversimplify some details...
In QM the electron must jump from one orbital to another, and the difference in energy is emitted as radiation as a photon. If the electron jumps from A to B, then B must be empty. So if A is the orbital with less energy then it can't emit. Also if B is full, it can't emit.
For a big enough system, there are plenty of options for B and you get a very good approximation that is the classic rule that says that accelerating electrons emit photons.
There are weird cases, like in a neutron star, there are too many electrons trapped by gravity so all possible B are full, and you have electrons that can't emit.
It you want a tabletop experiment, the keyword is "fermion gas" that are gas of fermions (like electrons) that are very cold and very dense and they have a strange repulsion that is not explained classically. It is caused because there are jumps that are forbidden because the destination is full. (If you heat them or give them more room to be diluted, this strange repulsion almost disappears and you can aproximarte them as a classical gas.)
> a distribution of radiation?
If you measure the radiation far away, you have a distribution of possible colors/energy of the photon, because the electron may choose to jump form A to B1, B2, B3, ... This is like the lines color of gas lamps.
If you measure close enough, you have to draw Feynman diagrams and the photons may have a slightly different value of color/energy. But it's complicated and I'm not sure of the details. I guess it's related to the acceleration distribution, but I'm not sure of the details again.
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The easy answer is that "acceleration -> radiation" is only a useful approximation when the system is big enough to ignore the quantum effect.
The hard answer is probably that you have to study like 10 years of physics to be sure and explain me the details. :)
Re "observed all the time": when gold interacts with light, the light's normally of a strength that's a small perturbation on the fields internal to the atom, which is basically why you can treat the atom/light-field system as two coupled quantum systems. It's an "observation" when the light leaves a classical trace such as a current in a CCD.
(I don't expect this to leave you unmystified about QM, but hopefully a bit clearer about it.)
You start with the Schrödinger equation, add relativity to get the Klein-Gordon equation which is a mess because it's second order in time involving negative probabilities, if you in ways "take the square root" of it you get the Dirac equation.
Relativity has been part of the understanding of electrons since 1928.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation
So yes very much so relativistic effects are a foundational part of QM.
* David Griffiths - Introduction to Elementary Particles
* Chris Quigg - Gauge Theories of the Strong, Weak, and Electromagnetic Interactions
And the wonderful Richard Behiel's videos on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Iu74b5iCuQ
This discovery is about a (seemingly, I haven't been keeping up too much) new case of one specific bond in one specific ion. Do not read the university's breathless press release, go straight to the article. The third sentence of the editor's summary is "It’s long been clear that this model starts to fray when the atoms get heavy enough for relativity to come into play".
> Researchers have shown the first direct experimental evidence that the textbook triple bond structure breaks down in heavy elements, where relativity makes the rules.
My guess to the Fermi paradox is that there actually are intelligent life across the universe but just like in Star Trek they stay quiet until we reach a certain level of knowledge.
Meanwhile, Galilean relativity has long gone out of patent, and people on board planes and other vehicles just move around like they were in a stationary reference frame paying no royalties.
Also, the foundational axioms of logic themselves could be valid only at a scale that is familiar to humans. For example, the strict bounday between true and false might get blurred and things could be true and false at the same time at other scale.
Being true and false at the same time is a contradiction. There is such a thing as mathematical intuitionism that rejects the rule of excluded middle, but it has nothing to do with grandiose generalizations.
The axioms of a logic that are consistent will definitely not let a statement be true and false at the same time.
Now, the meaning of the statements is definitely human, but the proofs go beyond
<https://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s6681.pdf>
He was a very proud Jew, who questioned whether he would have been had he not been born into such life. I disagree immensely with him on his pure-fatalism POV, but obviously everybody reading this knows his last name more than anyelse's [& definitely not mine].
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I have a degree in medicinal chemistry, back from the ancient mid-00s (pre Youtube) and just cannot imagine how incredible science education is/could_be with all the modern visual aids [†]. That models for every single element are just a click away and highly interactive, within any online web_browser (and without additional softwares).
Old is new again. Thanks Einstein. I cannot even begin to imagine just how far ahead his own brain was processing this complexity.
[†] Back then I was still doing organic chemistry rotations entirely within my own spatial cortex, because the only visuals were 2D prints in the library. Somehow earned 'A's {thanks brain}.
Is lead still used in common, mass-produced solar panels currently on the market? Wikipedia:
"Lead-based semiconductors such as lead telluride and lead selenide are used in photovoltaic cells and infrared detectors."
Wiki page for lead telluride mentions thermo-electric materials, page for lead selenide mentions IR imaging & detectors. Neither page even mentions solar panels.
Searching turns up mentions of use in flexible solar panels, which have a tiny market share. And iirc some/most of those use cadmium rather than lead compounds? (ok cadmium is equally nasty)
There's mention of lead solders used in solar panel construction. Leaded solders have been banned in EU due to its RoHS directive for a looong time, spare a few niche applications. Solar panels among those? If ever: still the case in 2026?
True: bismuth is used in some solders for similar reasons as lead.
And ofcourse there's recycling. One source mentioned ~0.1% of recycled panels by weight. Another source says overall lead content lower-level than safety limits for material on children's playgrounds.
All in all, that "toxic lead" statement reads more like outdated info. If not FUD.
Fun fact: this is why mercury is liquid at room temperature. Its inner electrons move at close to 60% the speed of light, pulling in its outer electrons more tightly, making it harder for it to bond and be solid. (I am not a physicist, don't rely on my statements for your space ship design)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_quantum_chemistry
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/anie.201302...
In gold it changes the color, in Mercury it changes freezing temperature.
Gallium has a low melting point 29.76C but that is due to unique chemical bonding.
"relativistic contraction" (shrinking of s and p orbitals) and "relativistic expansion" (destabilization of d and f orbitals) causes many observed phenomena.
Relativistic contraction of the 6s orbital and expansion of the 5d orbital lower the energy required to excite electrons. Consequently, gold absorbs blue light.
Strong relativistic contraction of the outer 6s electrons leaves them tightly bound and unavailable for metallic bonding. This results in incredibly weak atomic interactions, thus mercury a liquid at room temperature.
Lead also has 6s, which is what makes lead acid batteries work as well as they do.
So while the observed effects change, there are relativity effects with several nearby neighbors.
Without relativistic effects a lead acid battery would put out about .2V rather than 2V.
More details at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1008.4872
so the real world impact is, having anything at all
It’s all relative; in the quarks frame of reference it does get all its mass from the interaction with the Higgs field.
Similar to why the electron in a hydrogen atom doesn't keep emitting radiation and crash into the nucleus once it reaches its ground state... there's no lower state for it to jump to.
Is it a different set of rules for superfluids like 3He, or should the laws of superfluids cover heavy elements, too?
Here, again, a need for a model of superfluid quantum gravity
What is the difference between sound and radio?
A traditional explanation with Relativity says: Sound is compression waves through a medium, and radio is electromagnetic waves through no medium, and light is photon waves through no medium but gravity due to mass attraction changes the paths of the massless photon particles transiting through spacetime in a vacuum at c the max speed of light and photonic causation.
(But is there spooky action at a distance faster than c that's more than chance correlation?)
Superfluid Quantum Gravity (SQG) and Superfluid Vacuum Theory (SVT) say that the vacuum of space is not nothing; at Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) phases of matter, there is a new description of the particles in space. And there should be, because really what is between atoms and electrons in the nothingness of the vacuum of space at what altitude and temperature?
And so to describe the path of massive photons and standard massless photons through the superfluid of space, additional or alternate or sufficient superset mechanics to describe dilatant fluid model of spacetime at macro and micro and particle scales.
Is it Proca fields for massive photons with Airy-beam-like curvature?
/?hnlog Ctrl-F dilatant; dilatant quantum fluid model of gravity :
- > How to test whether MHD or SQR [or SQG or SVT] best explain the given phenomena?
- "Persistent shock wave around dead star puzzles astronomers" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46679704
- "A universal speed limit for spreading of coherence" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45928486 :
> "Physical vacuum as a dilatant fluid yields exact solutions to Pioneer anomaly and Mercury’s perihelion precession" (2019) https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/cjp-2018-0744 .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45220585
Like Oobleck? (2 parts cornstarch to 1 part water)
Where are the PROOFS? Show the EVIDENCE, or go home! No one cares about an other self declared "expert" who is preaching about quantum gravity without having any grasp on the subject.
Radio waves are light waves.