The Electron: Crash Course Chemistry #5

Associated with the addition of an

electron

, this energy is called

electron

affinity. Are you ready to hear something amazing now? If you've been following what we've been talking about using a periodic table, which of

course

is unlikely, you may have noticed something interesting. The s orbitals are on the left side, which are s 1 to 7. The d orbitals are in the middle, which are d 3 to 6. On the top right are p 2 to 6. And below on the lanthanide island . and actinides, there are f orbitals, which are 4f and 5f. So, just by looking at the periodic table, you can learn about the electron configurations, elemental stability, and basic physical reality of the elements.

And that's why I consider it such a beautiful thing, because once you know it, you see all the imperfect and competing harmonics, and all the processes and interactions that occur because of them, changing their arrangement and becoming something more stable, powerful. . , and eternal with each other, and creating everything. During today's episode, I explained electrons in primarily musical terms as vibrational waves and harmonics in the structure of the universe. I like to imagine it that way, but that's not a complete story, of

course

. And I'm tired of people telling me that the human mind is incapable of imagining subatomic reality.

So I'm going to throw a bunch of reality at you right now, no matter how strange it is. There are several fields that permeate the universe throughout it, and one of them is the electronic field. For an electron to exist, there must be agitation of the electronic field and we can describe these agitations as waves, just as a wave in the ocean is a agitation of water. At any time, an electron can be anywhere in the wave function. But the waves are not strictly delimited; They are strong in some places and weak in others. The strength of the wave at a given point in space determines the probability of finding an electron at that point at a given time if you measure it.

So if we are trying to understand reality, we should not imagine electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom like planets orbit a star, but rather we should imagine them as agitation around the nucleus, and the form of that agitation is a orbit. Orbits are precisely the reason everything exists. It is the root, the key, the link, the essence, the pivot and any other rhetorical metaphor not only of

chemistry

, but of existence. Thanks for watching this episode. I hope it really impressed you. If you've been paying attention, you've heard the story of a poor young man who was mocked and dismissed by arrogant scholars because he was more right than anyone could have imagined at the time.

The story of a Great Dane whose atomic model was incorrect is, however, brilliant. And that electrons are like music, and about the shells of electrons and the orbitals they contain, and how to write the formations of electrons, and what the ionization energies and affinities of electrons are, and how the periodic table links all these facts. With this knowledge firmly established in your minds, you will know more about electrons than 99.9 percent of the people in the world. This episode of Crash Course Chemistry was written by me, filmed and directed by Michael Aranda, who is also the sound designer.

It was edited by Nick Jenkins. The text was edited by Blake DeBastino and Dr. Heiko Lagner. Katherine Greene was the script supervisor and the graphics team was Thought Café.