Or, an electron, really. I am more interested in knowing, however ever small, how the “wave” of a baseball affects life, given the equation wave=h-bar/momentum.
What does it look like, anything? I understand that an electron is a particle or wave depending on the experiment, but what does the wave form look like? Just a wave spinning around an atom? I have also seen where you have the electron and they draw a wave around the outside of it. How does this look in the 3-D world?
Yea, I have no idea how to word it and thusly I have no idea what I am talking about, but how can you visualize waves?
I don’t know how much detail you want, but this page made my brain ache.
The fact of the matter (no pun intended!) is that the term “wave” is most likely a term of semantic convenience. Just as the particle form isn’t really a small, hard ball, although it behaves as such; the wave form isn’t really similar to a water or sound wave, but similar mathematics can be used to describe it. Asking what it looks like is as meaningless as asking what nothingness looks like. If the classic wave diagram helps you visualize it, then by all means use it. Physicists do.
Hell if I know. I tend to visualize it as a small fuzzy ball of electric charge, because that’s what it behaves like. What it actually “looks like” is probably oen of those unknowable things, since there are nearly limitless ways to model it that fit its behavior. Superstring theory, for example, models it as a loop of “string” vibrating in a particular mode. The equations that describe such a vibrating loop also happen to exactly describe the behavior of an electron. Does that mean an electron is actually a vibrating loop of string? Maybe. Or maybe not. I try not to think too deeply about such things.
Electrons are what we scientists call “very small.” So small it could not possibly make off with a whole leg.
Sorry. </MontyPython>
The whole point of quantum physics is that very tiny things, like atoms and subatomic particles, don’t behave like things we can see such as baseballs so trying to visualize one as a macroscopic object may be a moot point. Molecules are smaller than the wavelength of visible light so we use a scanning electron microscope to “see” them. I’m not aware of any way to do the same to “see” electrons.
