Re: Protons & electrons attractions

>>The uncertainty principle. The electron has already radiated away as
much
energy as it can, it has fallen into the proton as far as it can go.
With
Coulomb's law and the uncertainty principle you can derive the size of
a
hydrogen atom.

That's directly related to the electron being a wave. Uncertainty
principles aren't unique to quantum mechanics, every wave mechanics has

them, e.g. the duration versus frequency spread of a noise like a hand
clap or a pure tone. Quantum mechanics is (for the most part) just
another wave mechanics. <<

COMMENT:

A handwave mechanics <g>. Like most things in QM, we should note
there's a semiclassical way to view this also. The proton is mostly
empty space, with the quarks being points. Every time the electron
falls into the proton it just goes right on though. And what if it ever
did come close enough to "hit" a quark? With no way to lose energy, it
would just bounce off and go right back, like a superball. With no
friction and no angular momentum, an "orbit" can be a very chaotic
bunch of linear pass-throughs and angled bounces (angled because the
quarks are in motion too, and so this type of bounce keeps the electron
from staying on a straight line, rather like a weightless person whose
center of mass cannot move, but who can orient himself in any direction
by moving his limbs)

Yes, yes, I know this is not politically correct and we're supposed to
view the electron in hydrogen as some kind of semi-stationary charge
cloud wave. *But* there are non-stationary things about the electron
in a hydrogen atom that one can't ignore. There are tiny relativistic
corrections would wouldn't need to be applied unless the electron got
going pretty fast (about c*alpha = c/137 when the electron is near the
nucleus). There's also the very interesting fact that the charge cloud
around a deuterium atom isn't quite as large, and the difference is due
to the mass of the neutron. The center of the electron cloud isn't the
nucleus, but rather the center of mass of the electron-proton system,
and that's not quite the same place in deuterium. This is exactly as
happens in Newtonian orbits where both partners in orbits do the dance,
not just one. So the proton wiggles back and forth like a star with a
planet we can't see, and the deuteron does the same, but wiggles less.
Quantum mechanics or not, this makes a difference in the energies, and
this exact difference is what we see.

If the nucleus wiggles back and forth, even a little, certainly the
electron does too. In some odd and hard to fathom way.

SBH

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