@TheBreadmonkey what's actually non-intuitive about quantum mechanics? I suggest that whatever problems with "intuition" are getting in the way, are synthetic ones: people who are brought up with one set of arbitrary expectations about the physical world (i.e. that everything is, or ought to be, down to the deterministic behavior of discrete particles) are suddenly taught something else, and this produces the "non-intuitive" difficulties.

It's not that much different from chemistry is reckoned as confusing—because people are taught an arbitrarily simplified formalism at the start, and LATER get taught "oh actually things are more complicated than that". I think it amounts to deliberate obfuscation. The educational systems of "the West" are practically intended to confuse most people, in order to weed a select few geniuses—geniuses who are perceived to be geniuses along certain social and racial lines, mind you.

@mxchara Things like the bullshit we were taught in school: ”electrons circle like planets around the nucleus”, and then ”electrons jump to a higher shell when radiation hits them, you know those shells that you were taught in chemistry”, leading my 14 year old brain to think ”What? That doesn’t make any sense at all”.

I finally understood in my 30’s when I took a proper university physics course, that included quantum mechanics. The mystery of the 1.8V red LED:s also ceased to be a mystery.

@sleepybisexual @ahltorp hm. I've been trying to think of how to explain this myself.

Let me start with a much simpler physical system that also displays quantized behavior: a guitar string, constrained at both ends. The string vibrates back and forth, but the physical constraints of the system—the properties of the string itself and the distance between its endpoints—compel the string to vibrate only in certain modes, certain frequencies that we call the "fundamental mode" (the lowest possible frequency of vibration, in which the whole string is swinging back and forth in unison and only the endpoints are stationary) and its "overtones".

There's an infinite series of vibrational modes of the string, in theory, but in practice, if you were to measure the vibrations of the string over a long time and analyze them in the frequency domain, you'd find that most of the energy of the string's vibration went into the fundamental mode and the first few overtones.

These modes are equivalent to the excitational modes of electrons vibrating or oscillating around a nucleus.

(cont'd)

@sleepybisexual @ahltorp That system is more complicated because (a) it's three dimensional, and (b) at high enough energies of vibration, one must take special relativity into account, not something you'll usually worry about with guitar strings. All the same, the overall character of the physical system is roughly equivalent: there's a highly mobile thing that's free to wobble about (the electron cloud) and physical constraints (the force of attraction to the nucleus) which cause that cloud of electrons to be limited to moving about within a definite set of modes.

We call those modes "orbitals", because they're roughly analogous to the gravitational orbits of discrete bodies, but in fact orbitals are three-dimensional shapes and they're defined not as specific paths or lines which the electrons take, but as regions of probability density. one is more or less likely to find the electron at certain distances and solid angles around the nucleus, in these various orbitals.

(cont'd)