The image that most people have of an atom is similar to that shown here with tiny electrons whizzing around a larger nucleus comprising an assortment of protons and neutrons. This makes it easy to imagine many of the things we are asked to believe about atoms. However, the atom does not look like this even according to mainstream science!
We can imagine electrons becoming detached from an atom and flowing along a wire to become an electric current or we can picture one of them dropping from a higher orbit to a lower one to release a photon, but the atom does not look like this and an electron is not as depicted in the diagram and so all our imaginings are in vain.
The Electron Cloud model
Science articles and YouTube lectures by physicists all depict something like the images below representing electron clouds or atomic orbitals.
Each diagram is supposed to represent the probability of finding an electron at a particular place, with darker shading representing a higher probability.
These are the electron orbitals but the electrons do not actually move along an orbital path, all we know is that we might measure one somewhere if we use the correct instruments.
So electrons:
- Have an orbital but do not orbit
- Have a property called ‘spin’ but they do not spin
- Have angular momentum which appears to be unrelated to spin
- Have mass and charge (fictional qualities anyhow)
- Have a position which is only specified by a probability function
- Have energy and linear momentum
Recommended is to watch this short video from the Science Asylum to see how mind bending the whole thing is even for the commentator himself.
This is certainly confusing, with the Wikipedia entry on Electron Clouds even proclaiming “The electron cloud is not really a thing.”!
The idea of a probability cloud comes from quantum mechanics but it doesn’t really explain anything. It doesn’t explain why the cloud is this particular shape or where the electron is when it is not being measured.
Quantum mechanics seems to work fine as a theoretical construct for some applications but that does not mean that the ideas can be automatically ported across to other areas of physics or that abstract concepts such as probability functions have any meaningful interpretation in the Real World.
The new version of the atom is clearly quite different from the traditional Bohr Model and should supplant it completely but what has happened is that scientists have continued to express it in terms of existing and familiar concepts such as charge, mass, probability, energy etc. when they should have scrapped the whole lot and started from scratch.
How to resolve this?
The atom as a Field Vortex (Konstantin Meyl)
The diagrams shown below are taken from Konstantin Meyl (Potential Vortex – Volume 4). Compare with the electron clouds above.
The resemblance is quite remarkable.
These are drawings of the theoretical construct of atoms consisting of field vortices. Think of these for now as electrically charged soap bubbles. The charges on the bubbles will repel each other, leading to deformation of the usually spherical bubbles into shapes such as the ones shown.
In actuality, these apparently solid constructs are stable states of a continually moving field structure which has a tendency to form spherical vortex structures consisting of spinning electric fields with associated magnetic dipoles.
We can now resolve some of the conceptual problems associated with the electron cloud model.
- Orbitals but no orbiting. Movement around the orbital is field movement as opposed to movement of a charged particle.
- Spin but not spinning. Spin comes from the field and creates a magnetic dipole but no mass is moving and so there is no spinning as usually thought of.
- Angular momentum. This is now unrelated to the spin as the spin is field movement and not the orbiting of a charged particle with mass.
- Charge is an illusion created by the presence of a field but it is not of a particulate nature and is not necessarily associated with a mass.
- Indeterminate position. The field constitutes the entire electron orbital and so the ‘position’ is distributed over the whole orbital. The imagining that there is a small charged article whizzing around has caused confusion. Probably the assumption of a particle together with the measuring technique and some unusual mathematics is what is causing this illusion. The field is not quantised until it is measured.
- Fuzziness of cloud. The field is not strictly confined to an infinitely thin shell but extends beyond it with decreasing field strength thereby giving the impression of a ‘probability cloud’.
Summary
The resemblance between contemporary visualisations of electron clouds and the almost hand drawn diagrams of Konstantin Meyl is too great to ignore. There must be something of worth here.
The vortex model of Meyl needs wider publicity and the Bohr model is now a misleading fantasy. The current model of mainstream science is a horrible mash-up of classical ideas (particles, mass, charge etc.) together with the quantum weirdness of probability wave functions which have no reasonable interpretation in the physical world.
The field equations of Meyl give a self-consistent theoretical explanation for the shapes and phenomena we see and allow for quantitative predictions to be made without the need for a multiplicity of ‘properties’.
References:
Potential Vortex – Volume 4
Author: Knstantin Meyl
Website: http://meyl.eu
Electron cloud – Wikipedia
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_cloud
Atomic orbitals – Wikipedia
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital
What is quantum spin? – The science asylum
https://youtu.be/sB1EPGmpzyg