now it's time for me to get something
off my chest it's been bugging me since
I was a little kid so you may as well be
my first victims now all of you out
there know what an atom looks like right
it looks like this so am i right no I'm
wrong that's called the boss Sommerfeld
atom that's what an atom looked like
back in the 1920s and ever since the
introduction of quantum mechanics
towards the end of the 20s that's been
obsolete this 19 years old it's ancient
and yet people still think of this as
the picture of the atom I prefer to
think of this as the hula hoop atom now
the thing that really bugs me is that
corporations and even some research
institutions when they want to convince
you that they're at the cutting edge
they go and stick a couple of these a
little atoms in the corporate logo only
the thing like Apple advertising their
iPhone by showing you a candlestick
telephone it's crazy what's a better way
of representing in the atom instead of
these hula hoop orbits you should think
of the electrons as buzzing around the
nucleus in a fuzzy little cloud or
electron cloud have a look at this so
imagine we have this fuzzy spherical
thing a bit like that we can chop it up
into a whole bunch of pieces we can chop
it up into spherical bits called S
orbitals these more complicated things
called P orbitals and these ring like
these things that look like calamari
that we call D orbitals
so what are these orbitals mean
basically that fuzziness tells you the
probability that there's an electron
there because quantum mechanics says at
any given moment we can't tell you
exactly where electrons are going to be
and what speed is going all we can do is
calculate the probability is going to be
in some point the probability has a
certain speed and so on and those
electron clouds represent that fuzzy
probability that's not the only way that
you can chop up the electron cloud what
I showed you is typically the way that
physicists do it
chemists mathematically chop up their
electron clouds using a different set of
orbitals this is an S orbital spherical
thing this is a p orbital a dumbbell
shaped orbital you have pointing in all
sorts of directions and there's a couple
of examples of D orbitals so my advice
to the marketing department of some
great corporation that wants to show you
how cutting-edge they are is that
instead of using hula hoop atoms they
should include balloon animals in their
corporate logos No thank you for
listening
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