Of course. There’s probability for everything. The probability of finding an electron outside of it’s orbital is low unless energy is added to the system. I teach chemistry at the college level so I’m sort of aware of these things.
Oh, and by the way, I said orbitals, not orbits. Electrons in orbitals are not electrons orbitting nuclei like planets.
I was being generous interpreting your statement:
Electrons don’t “move around with the confines of their orbitals”. An orbital reflects the probability volume of an atomic electron. There is no motion within an orbital.
This doesn’t make sense. An atomic orbital is nonzero in any volume. That is, there is no “outside” of an orbital, only more or less probable results of a position measurement.
I’m sure you understand the physics, but the words you are using are confusing. When we use a particle metaphor, the electron orbitting the nucleus makes sense, even when it’s not capturing the actuality very well. When we talk about the quantum mechanics, the entity we call an electron is not a particle, and an orbital is not a description of motion, but of its state.
(I’m not an expert pedagogue, so any failure to explain myself is mine own. But I hope you do see how mixing metaphors is not helpful to students.)
Indeed, if Schrödinger were alive today, he would turn over in his grave. That’s pretty weak tea to hang your hat on.
For what it’s worth, there’s also a phenomenon called “gravitational friction”, AKA “dynamical friction”, that works similarly to the friction we’re familiar with: Take any gravitational system with a very large number of orbiting objects, like an overly-dense asteroid belt, and let everything interact with everything else. Even if all of the individual interactions are conservative gravitational interactions, the net effect on the cloud of objects as a whole, or to objects passing through the cloud, is similar to fluid friction.
This stuff is interesting, but just to emphasize that the existence of these esoteric gravitational phenomena that share the names “drag” and “friction” are irrelevant to the OP. These phenomena do not affect anything at the scale of electrons, baseballs, mountains - anything from our everyday experience down to subatomic particles. They only come into play at interplanetary scales with very massive objects.
Not irrelevant-- You’re just looking at the analogy through the wrong end of the telescope. Interactions between very large numbers of gravitating objects produce drag-like effects, even though any single individual gravitational interaction is frictionless. In the same way, interactions between very large numbers of charged particles (i.e., everyday life) produces drag-like effects, even though any single individual electromagnetic interaction is frictionless.
I couldn’t remember the physics if you pointed a gun to my head. However, it sounds like we’re saying something similar except for a one thing. You say that an electron is not a particle. An electron has properties of both a particle and a wave. That’s what makes it difficult.
The electron is treated like a standing wave and you can think of the orbital as the electron itself. In this sense, the electron would still be ‘moving’ in that it is oscillating. However, the final equation squares the wavefunction. That creates the electron cloud which is the probability of finding an electron somewhere in the cloud. Or is the electron the cloud itself? When an electron absorbs energy, it ‘occupies’ a new orbital. That new orbital definitely has different dimensions around the nucleus. Does it become the new orbital or is it a particle that you would most like find in a location defined by the function of the new orbital?
Electrons definitely have particle properties especially when they’re free. They even have a radius. But the math for the orbitals is independent of time so the notion of movement is not really addressed (there is a time-dependent equation, but I remember nothing about it). I don’t think that means that they don’t ‘move’ because there is kinetic energy associated with them. So, it’s not obvious to me whether they move within the confines of the orbital or they are static or they are the orbitals.
Isn’t an electron a subatomic particle?
There’s particles and then there’s particles. For example, from that wikipedia entry:
This led to the concept of wave–particle duality to reflect that quantum-scale particles behave like both particles and waves.
(underlining added.)
The word “particles” is used differently in the two instances.
Yes, you have it right here (not going to quote your whole response). The conceptual stumbling block is the misunderstanding that an electronic orbital represents motion of an electron.
This is very cool. It also implies there’s a temperature associated with a collection of orbits.