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I saw a PowerPoint slide presentation recently demonstrating how electrons form different kind of bonds in molecules, with the orbits of each electron modeled b
by bane 11y ago
I saw a PowerPoint slide presentation recently demonstrating how electrons form different kind of bonds in molecules, with the orbits of each electron modeled by hand in powerpoint and animated...including custom paths for the valence electrons.
Among all the atoms in the molecule, there were dozens of electrons whipping around the slide in perfect loops, it was kind of breathtaking to think somebody spent likely weeks putting that slide together.
- santaclaus 11y agoI always wondered why presentation packages like PowerPoint and Keynote do not expose a scripting API to allow one to programmatically keyframe animations and such. That would make these sorts of effects almost trivial to achieve.
- jjoonathan 11y agoIt seems a bit odd to spend that much time animating individual electrons flying about. From QM we know that such classical models completely and utterly fail to reproduce almost all important bonding behavior (certainly anything covalent). Don't get me wrong, the schematic bonding formalism employed by chemists is very useful and students need to learn it even before they learn the QM behind it, but showing electrons flying around a ppt slide departs from the schematic formalism towards a conceptual destination which is plausible but incorrect and lies in the exact opposite direction from our current best model of physical reality. Of course, the instructor may have been ridiculing the model or using it as a bookkeeping mechanism for a more advanced class, but if this slide was made for an intro chem course it sounds like a complete pedagogical mess. A textbook example (hopefully not literally) of doing something only because you can and making things worse in the process :(