Visitors on Monday.
Homework is posted - due a week from today, on Thu the 12th. (No class Mon the 16th - I'm out of town)
Summary of 3D quantum numbers:
n 1 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4
l 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 etc
m 0 0 -1 0 1 0 -1 0 -1 -2 -1 0 1 2
i.e.
quick quiz: what are these things & what physical properties do they correspond to?
Continue discussion of "Hydrogen Atom" chapter material:
On wikipedia :
There is a lot of bullshit floating around about these topics.
For example, our textbook says on page 215 "However, it is not correct to use the classical analogy to think of the electron as a tiny ball of charge spinning about an axis, because the electron is a point particle with no physical size." Nonsense - the electron is neither a classical ball of charge spinning on its axis nor a point particle with no size. One of our essential truths here is that particles and waves are words from our macroscopic intuition, neither of which is entirely true for quantum entities. It is entirely true that angular momentum is conserved, that when photons are emitted they carry angular momentum, and that we can observe that the spin of the electron is part of this angular momentum balance, which is why we call that property "spin". Whether they are actually spinning - who knows. If they really had "no size", then the potential energy arbitrarily close would be arbitrarily high, since 1/r goes to infinity as r goes to 0. So that model is just as ridiculous as a ball of charge.
I have also seen a bunch of chemistry texts that say for example that the n=1, l=0 three states are m=-1,0,1, and then show pictures of the px, py, pz states ... which are not the m=-1,0,1 states. The wikipedia "orbitals" article has a nice animation showing the difference.