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Particles are a really useful fiction. I'm having a tough time thinking of how to teach and explain chemistry without the concept of valence electrons. Do you h
by tedsanders 9y ago
Particles are a really useful fiction. I'm having a tough time thinking of how to teach and explain chemistry without the concept of valence electrons. Do you have any ideas?
(Related tangent: a super important but occasionally missed nuance of quantum mechanics is that the waves are not waves over 3D real space. They are waves over configuration space, with way more than 3 dimensions.)
- k__ 9y agoThen what are they in 3D space?
- tedsanders 9y agoThe electromagnetic field and other fields exist over 3D space. But the probability waves that represent them are in infinite dimensional space, because each point in 3D can have multiple states at once (and these states are correlated/entangled over space).
- xaedes 9y agoOne wouldn't teach sort algorithms or data structures by explaining how the individual bits are flipping. It is totally appropriate to use abstractions to teach concepts.