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This sounds a bit like old quantum theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_quantum_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_quantum_theory I'd say the intuit
by ridiculous_fish 6y ago
This sounds a bit like old quantum theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_quantum_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_quantum_theory
I'd say the intuition here is misleading. S orbitals (including the ground state) really are spherically symmetric. There are no waves "around" the orbital: they only vary in the radial direction.
But "must smoothly connect" is important. As you walk outwards from the nucleus, the electron wavefunction oscillates until it reaches the classical turning point, when it switches to exponential decay. Only a very few functions can smoothly join these two modes, which is one explanation for why bound state energies are quantized.
- heavenlyblue 6y agoI think it only depends on how you visualise the wave function. In that case the drawing was 2-dimensional, but the wave function was defined as a third dimension (it was orthogonal to the plane in which the electron was orbiting the nucleus). It was reasonably clear to me that either the size of the wave was incredibly small compared to the size of the orbital or it was oscillating in some other dimension.