@@stapler942 And complex numbers are pretty much only used because dealing with sines and cosines is extremely annoying and tedious, and exponents are way easier.
I'm almost seventy. I studied chemistry at university at the introductory level for a medical degree and I have gradually realised how little I knew (and still know). Nick makes this accessible for those of us like myself who have minimal knowledge and who want a deeper understanding. Kudos to you Nick! We love you 🙂 (From Australia).
i live this world, like you do. I tell people, we grabbed a earth globe and where told 'behold, for this is what you live on' - for when i went to school there were no pictures of the earth from outer space. we had to believe.
The probability that I learn something every time I watch one of these videos is 100%. There aren't many channels here on the old YT that have that ability.
Usually, I disable Adblock Plus on your videos and watch those boring Ads. This all what I can do now to support you. You deserve more and more. I am grateful for you 🙏
I was solving Schrodinger's equation for hydrogen atom when the notification of this video pops up.... I realised that I was certainly missing physics while working on maths... *Thank you so much Nick for giving me right direction*..
I’m intrigued by probability flow, but I thought orbital transitions were instantaneous? I.e. the probability distribution switched discretely from that of the first orbital to that of the second without any intermediate distribution. Otherwise, it would seem to make sense to say that the election was described by fractional quantum numbers during the transition interval, and I would expect that multiple photons of intermediate energies might be emitted. Is the ‘flow’ visualisation intended to give a sense of the probability distribution of the superposition of the before and after states? Or does it model an actual dynamical process evolving over continuous time? Relatedly, on Thursday SciShow discussed tunnelling on the order of milliseconds. (th-cam.com/video/Is7_5nQOkeM/w-d-xo.html )
@@christiancampbell466 You've got to put spaces between links and parentheses in YT comments: ( th-cam.com/video/Is7_5nQOkeM/w-d-xo.html ) otherwise YT thinks their part of the link... for some stupid reason I don't understand 🤦♂️
The way I learned it, The two orbitals are in superposition and the coefficients of each smoothly change, one rising and one falling. It never exists in a shape that is intermediate.
@@christiancampbell466 No, it's not instantaneous. But, it will always appear to be fully in one form or the other. The wave function evolves over time, but you never observe the superposition.
@@ScienceAsylum Parens are legal characters in URLs, so not stupid. You're supposed to use angle brackets to offset them, anyway. What I do find stupid about YT comments is that the markup for *bold* or _strong_ does not like being adjacent to punctuation. E.g. I want bold at the end of this *sentence*.
The fact that probability is conserved like energy is like the weirdest/coolest weird/cool aspect of quantum mechanics. And understanding probability flow mathematically is probably key to understanding the detailed nature of how electrons mechanic at all, which again is really neat.
its not like that. probability is an abstraction. in reality, the particles do exists as an electromagnetic fluid standing wave. trying to find a point in a moving volume of fluid is just misinterpreted as the probability to find the particle. if you try to measure its influence and pin it to a point smaller than its actual influenced volume, then of course it will be a probabilistic distribution. but its a huge falsehood to interpret these probabilities as physical things. its just an artifact of trying to make a uniform fluid disconnected, point like objects. its just a mechanical wave of a superfluid that is prephysical, meaning that matter is formed out of its nested standing waves, and their fields are the pressure differentials that influence each other. particles behave like waves because they are waves, not particles. treating them like particles is a macroscopic approximation. really the universe is just a gigantic superfluidic ocean, its waves are are called em waves or gravity waves depending on how they are caused, and matter is just a bunch of mechanical waves with specific wave lengths locked in a a perpetual standing wave. the whole universe with everything inside is a single object, a single fluid, and everything that exists inside it is just a giant compounding standing wave emitting and receiving billions of waves every second.
@@sshreddderr9409 it's an interesting point, but for me, idk, if we can't pierce beyond the veil of the abstraction, does it not then by definition become reality, at least as far as we could 'scientifically prove', Plato's cave allegory and all that -- meaning, we all have two choices; describe the shadow, or make something up, personally I find descriptions of the shadow more real than someone just making something up about where it came from, fun to think about either way though
@@georganatoly6646you would be right if the mainstream pushed abstraction was the best model we could come up with, but its not. If mainstream scientists would think of the universe as a fluid like people such as Tesla, Maxwell, Faraday etc., particularly a superfluid and tried to understand subatomic phenomena as actions of such , we would have antigravity, nuclear fusion and free energy going mainstream, and with it we could create any material at no cost, need no fuel, and we could have cheap space travel without all the typical issues and dangers.
My "🤯" moment: Spherical Coordinates @4:05 Your explanation finally made a clear cut distinction between quantum spin and angular momentum vs the classical physics sense of those terms in my brain. IT FINALLY MAKE SENSE!
Wow this video was extremely cool. You explained the probability current so good. We're studying "quantum mechanics I" this semester and I'm loving it so far. We have such a great professor. Yes, quantum mechanics is weird but it's also amazing.
ah, i like how everything about the early comments are simply being early also, nice video! i don't know much about maths, as my knowledge is limited to high school lessons, but i want to understand the maths part of all these stuff. so thanks for explaining them in a way that doesn't require college level maths
@@eduardoGentile720 PBS is so hard to keep up with before they take for granted that their viewership has deep maths and physics background...like how can you understand orbital shapes without knowing about spherical coordinates?
I don't know about simpler, but this channel is certainly way better focused. PBS Spacetime is well produced, but I always get the feeling that I was taken on a journey where at the end I'd forgot where I started. Here, I always feel like my time was well spent learning just one new thing.
I love you Nick! Your videos just keep getting better. AND it only helps that I've just started Quantum Mechanics and Statistical Mechanics at uni!! Keep em coming!
I wish this video was a couple hours longer, im taking physical chemistry in university right now and this video definitely helped simplify such an abstract concept
You are making me think that we must learn everything like a child. Ask, reason it, think, play with it, enjoy it. Worth watching your wonderful channel
You really help even smooth brain types like myself to understand these types of complicated subjects a little better. Thanks for what you do here Nick.
WHY CANT MY QUANTUM PROFESSOR TEACH LIKE YOU DO??!!! Awesome stuff, I've been stuck on fully conceptualizing spherical harmonics for hours, you're a lifesaver!
My God!! I never expected to have this much of understanding in this topic.... without visual info it's really hard to get those ideas around. Kudos to the physicists who came up with this at those times without computers to visualize...
Yes it was an excellent pun... But I was a bit disappointed, I was hoping for some explanation about how the electrons travel around the nucleus. I am a lay person with only basic understanding of physics, and I grew up at a time when we all learned the Bohr model (even though quantum physics was already well established), and so have always had the planetary system image in my mind... So I came to this video hoping to get some idea of how the electron behaves through time. Does it just randomly appear at any of the locations in the probability cloud, magically blipping from one location to another? Or does it travel in some random path between these points?
this is another helpful visual to imagine what atoms really look like. Thanks! For those who may hate dot structures just want to say the classic diagrams are DIAGRAMS.they are a tool , no one is claiming that a diagram is what something really looks like. Think of a blueprint, no one looks at it and rages at an architect that THAT'S NOT WHAT A HOUSE REALLY LOOKS LIKE!
Good analogy with the blueprint 👍. Whenever commenters ask what an atom actually looks like, I have to say "It doesn't look like anything." For something to have an appearance, light has to interact with it in a similar way to everyday objects. Atoms don't do that. Diagrams are all we've got.
In my high school chemistry class, they always taught it that protons and neutrons are little balls stuck together and the electrons are also even smaller balls that orbit around the nucleus. I just wish they had at least mentioned all the weird quantum stuff even if just as a side note.
3:08 That Panic Clone! Caught me off-guard XD I kinda had the same reaction too! 4:42 & 7:49 "Radial Coords" & "Probability Current" : That's just so beautiful!
Another great vid Nick , and I loved your comment around the 02.57 mark, I’ve always thought to myself that quantum mechanics would be so much easier if no one cared where the Electron was , you’ve come out and said my own thoughts lol 😂
Lol yes I was just watching Sabine’s take on this very topic and thought I wonder how Nick would explain this and then , as if by magic, this video dropped . What’s the probability of that?
Fantastic explanation. This guy is a genius! Plus, I love the Timeline! Reminds me of the Wayback Machine of Professor Peabody from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show. To the Timeline, y'all! 😃❤
One of the best Science dudes on TH-cam. And rarest amongst all because the depth of explanation and visualization he presented along with pretty clones and humours is really an ultimate amalgamation of a science mentor!
"We generally don't look because we want the position to be uncertain" I'm guessing that's an exploitation of the uncertainty principle and the use of the Fourier transform that converts a highly delocalized position into a localized momentum. With maximum uncertainty in position you get minimum uncertainty in momentum which is the more practically useful metric.
Yes, but the uncertainty principle isn't just about position with momentum. There's a general version that lets you relate any property with any other property. The cool thing is that some of them result in a zero, which means they share states (like energy and orbital angular momentum).
You sir , made the whole mess of my brain clear about the orbital. I had consulted my seniors about this and my friends and they similarly said the same thing but u couldn't visualise it. You did it good!
Isn't that (at least suspected to be) because the CMB reflects the state of the universe when the whole observable universe was at a size that puts it in the quantum scale, and so prone to quantum effects?
@@ulti-mantis Not as far as I know. The CMB that we can observe is roughly a sphere cross-section of the early universe, and spherical harmonics are a way to analyse anything that varies over the surface of a sphere. Electron orbitals are generated by the spherically-symmetric field of the nucleus, which is presumably why they match up to spherical harmonics too.
For a guy about 3⁰ off center, he sure gives a coherent and intuitive explanation of orbitals. What's interests me is that this part of the explanation of orbitals is very little changed from what I was shown 50 years ago, while taking Physical Chemistry at Univ. of Ca. This, and basic thermodynamics haven't changed, it seems. Everything beyond here, though is a brave new world, for me. I note that everyone's talking about "life". I used my B.S. in chemistry in 1971 to get into med school; my B.S. and my M.D. have given me a keen interest in the idea of "life". And I think Life is more of an idea than a thing. If a complex entity composed mostly of carbon-based molecules capable of interacting with other carbon-based molecules acting as "enzymes" can (1) acquire and manipulate energy via organic-phosphate chemical bonds, and if the entity can (2) channel the harvested energy into physical processes like locomotion, harvesting of MORE energy rich complex molecules (i.e. eating), and if it can (3) redirect that energy back into #1 and #2, and into the biochemical processes that sustain the machinery to accomplish #1 and #2, then it has "life". "Life" is simply the amalgamation of processes and their supporting structures in a way that allows the entity to maintain an overall entropy less than the cumulative entropy of the environment in which it sits. That should not be a sustainable state, unless the entity harvests energy from it's "food", i.e. gives entropy to the environment. On a macro level that looks like eating, the entity taking in complex molecules, breaking down the food's organization thereby giving unwanted entropy to the disassembled food. If you graph the inverse of entropy (S) vertically against time horizontally, our molecular-biological entity is standing on a peak of 1/S, and balancing in this low entropy (i.e. unlikely) position by eating and harvesting electrons that are put to use maintaining this balance. The electrons stripped from the food are exchanged for entropy. The electrons' energy is cycled back into these processes, repeating endlessly. The order embodied in the "food" is returned to the environment as an increase in entropy. Living beings are simply entropy mills, themselves thermodynamically unlikely, but facilitating an increase in entropy for the overall system. THAT is the meaning of life. Dostoevsky might not agree.
Dude, this is one of the best videos youve ever done. Again, youre the best science channel on youtube, in a way that you always go DEEPER, but never lose the clarity of the explanation.
People say you are cringy, well I agree so. But, if you were not cringy and fun, it would be like a 70 years old professor mumbling science things. The fact that you are cringy IS the fact that you are one of the most beautiful science channels for me. I just wanted to mention it because so many people insult you that way, but as I said it is a relief that you are not boring
WOW, both Portal 1:04 and MYST 1:50 references in one episode, and the mind blowing fact that "position is a pretty pointless property" 2:55. Let your probability flow like a mountain stream!
I love that you're getting more into the math in your videos. I've said it before but I'll say it again -- understanding the maths everything start to make so much more sense in physics, especially QM. It's so different from our every day experience that the math is the only way to really get an intuition for what's going on.
When I took organic chemistry in undergrad, I came up with my own way of visualizing and intuiting the behavior of electrons by imagining them as water flowing around planets, and I would imagine larger planets for the more electronegative elements. My model was so effective that I made the highest grade at the end of the semester out of about 175 students who took the course.
Nice video, thanks! just a question: We know that the energy is quantized so it has definite values, then does this probability "transition" have a changing value of energy? or does it keep the initial value of energy during the transition and will change the initial value of energy only when it reaches it's final state?
Energy only has definitely values when the electron is in an energy state. During the transition, the electron is in a superposition of energy states, so it doesn't have a definite energy.
You had me at cake and blew my mind at 4:40, in two years each of undergraduate chemistry, math, and physics courses, I never caught that as being how those orbital diagrams are plotted.
I was impressed with the visualization of probability current. This might be the best visualization of a concept in QM that is well understood mathematically yet defies our intuition and conceptualization. Awesome!
I don't know if the cake is a lie but as someone who teaches high school chemistry and physical science the more of your videos i watch the more i realize that my job is basically to lie to children. Keep up the great work!
That's the art of teaching, Zack: Knowing exactly how much to lie. You've got to make what you're saying believable in the limited time that you have to explain it.
Why lie? Why not make it clear it's a simplification of a more complex idea? It's what I do with Private Pilot Aerodynamic theory. I'm not going to get into advanced math to explain lift, but I am going to tell them there is advanced math to deeply understand it, but here's a basic way of thinking about it unless you want to publish a paper on aerodynamics. Sometimes the students better at higher maths than I am become interested enough to learn more about it. Sometimes just knowing there's somewhere further to go engages people more than a half explanation.
@@Cogline6 Besides we all know the Real lying happens in History and Civics Class :) And Home Ec. Never actually buy the giant sized tube of toothpaste, it's not cheaper and it's gonna get gross way before you finish it!
@@mzaite because you can do better things with your time than preface every statement with "this is a simplified version of how things were once thought to have worked back in the day, it's pretty true and gives us a good idea for how things work, but keep in mind that newer theories have disproved/reworked/remodeled the idea".
Nick, you're simply the best. Your way of explaining complex matter is unbeatable! At least in my case ;-). Thanks for all the effort! It's really worth!!!
Great video. But, let's not detract chemistry. In Pchem courses you get a taste of all this, and also molecular orbitals, which in my opinion are even more exciting.
These videos are so good I feel obliged to watch all the ads as well to encourage your sponsors to keep assisting the asylum in making them..... Take note you sponsors this is not just enjoyable funstuff but also brilliantly educational, but details of your book(s) would be appreciated so I can buy them for my upcoming birthday...... Sure beats the heck out of socks and sweaters !
Is the cake a lie? Idk...i feel that my life before that video is a lie...how come nobody(at any level of teaching) takes the time to show what spherical coordonates are?? How can you understand shapes and what angular momentum in quantum physics without that piece of info??
Because teaching a monkey a trick is way easier than teaching a monkey to actually understand. And our school systems are such that the you only pass a class if you can do the mathematical tricks, even if you are completely clueless as to what the tricks are for
iam a 12th student from india and also a science freak the topics in our books are absurd but you give us the real meaning.ur great dude. i want guys like u to come up
Not really. An atom is made up of the subatomic particles Electrons, Protons and Neutrons. Protons and Neutrons are them self made up of elementary particles called Quarks. This fact doesn't make the previous statement wrong.
@@Katniss218 Can't realllllyy do that though, any more than you could describe a car as "a lump of metal, glass and rubber". I mean sure that's true, but eliminating the middlemen (ie: the structure) kind of loses a lot of rather relevant information). (PS: I do realize it was a joke and chuckled a bit myself. Just being pedantic).
"Position is a pretty pointless property" Wow, that was subtle.
@@JasminUwU electron is a point
@@JasminUwU The position is not a point in quantum mechanics
It's also has alliteration
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
@@Bluelightzero Exactly my point.
Ok, ok I'll let my self out :-)
"one angle draws a curve, and the other makes it a surface." ....and here's today's Science Asylum light bulb moment! you really are the best, Nick ❤️
Hey wait, this is just solids of rotation from first-year calculus all over again, isn't it? Only with complex numbers now.
@@stapler942 sometimes you need to hear it 20 times before it really hits you
@@stapler942 And complex numbers are pretty much only used because dealing with sines and cosines is extremely annoying and tedious, and exponents are way easier.
When your wife calls you and asks where are you at 2 AM. "Position is a pretty pointless property, honey"
😂
all that matters is your energy and momentum
@@ItsRubyGD or her momentum when she finally sees you after hearing that answer 😂
Not gonna find comments like this on PBS science channel.
Up your game PBS.
"We are entangled. Since you are worried that I was doing something wrong it automatically means I am not."
I'm almost seventy. I studied chemistry at university at the introductory level for a medical degree and I have gradually realised how little I knew (and still know). Nick makes this accessible for those of us like myself who have minimal knowledge and who want a deeper understanding. Kudos to you Nick! We love you 🙂 (From Australia).
If that pic of you is recent youre looking good for 70. Nice work man
i live this world, like you do. I tell people, we grabbed a earth globe and where told 'behold, for this is what you live on' - for when i went to school there were no pictures of the earth from outer space. we had to believe.
The probability that I learn something every time I watch one of these videos is 100%. There aren't many channels here on the old YT that have that ability.
Another great channel is Jerenism. THIS guy will blow your mind!
2:55 "Position is a pretty much pointless property" -- wow, you said that with absolutely no smirk, well done.
Full disclosure: There's a smirk in the original footage about 2 seconds after that cut 😂.
How did I miss that joke?!
@@Lucky10279 It's a pun _AND_ an alliteration!
that small pause before "to the timeline" was AWESOME
AGREE!!
little pause or no little pause; the timeline is....
wfi.....
again, wfi.....
*AWESOME!!!*
wfi = wait for it
That's What makes Nick sir unique.
A pause filled with an anticipating grin ... priceless. And yes, I did proclame 'to the timeline!' in sync 😅
It felt like an editing error to me.
Great stuff Nick
Papa flammy for life!!
Papa flammy everywhere!! Papa flammy is upgrading to papa ray!!
Papa!!!!
I didn't know you watched this channel, papa. Good to see you here.
@@gabor6259 He's everywhere. Like an electron.
Usually, I disable Adblock Plus on your videos and watch those boring Ads. This all what I can do now to support you. You deserve more and more. I am grateful for you 🙏
It will not surprise you that Nick's book (see video description) is utterly fantastic and thorough and deep with many detailed worked problems.
I was solving Schrodinger's equation for hydrogen atom when the notification of this video pops up.... I realised that I was certainly missing physics while working on maths... *Thank you so much Nick for giving me right direction*..
Jee Aspirant?
@@theastonishingworld7986 pursuing msc in physics from iit Jodhpur.
@@madhuverma5998 Hehe new it would have some IIT connection, good for you.
I loved the notion of "probability flow". It opens a lot of new ways of looking orbital deformation.
I’m intrigued by probability flow, but I thought orbital transitions were instantaneous? I.e. the probability distribution switched discretely from that of the first orbital to that of the second without any intermediate distribution. Otherwise, it would seem to make sense to say that the election was described by fractional quantum numbers during the transition interval, and I would expect that multiple photons of intermediate energies might be emitted.
Is the ‘flow’ visualisation intended to give a sense of the probability distribution of the superposition of the before and after states? Or does it model an actual dynamical process evolving over continuous time?
Relatedly, on Thursday SciShow discussed tunnelling on the order of milliseconds. (th-cam.com/video/Is7_5nQOkeM/w-d-xo.html )
@@christiancampbell466 You've got to put spaces between links and parentheses in YT comments: ( th-cam.com/video/Is7_5nQOkeM/w-d-xo.html ) otherwise YT thinks their part of the link... for some stupid reason I don't understand 🤦♂️
The way I learned it, The two orbitals are in superposition and the coefficients of each smoothly change, one rising and one falling. It never exists in a shape that is intermediate.
@@christiancampbell466 No, it's not instantaneous. But, it will always appear to be fully in one form or the other. The wave function evolves over time, but you never observe the superposition.
@@ScienceAsylum Parens are legal characters in URLs, so not stupid. You're supposed to use angle brackets to offset them, anyway.
What I do find stupid about YT comments is that the markup for *bold* or _strong_ does not like being adjacent to punctuation. E.g. I want bold at the end of this *sentence*.
I have been a JEE Aspirant for the past 2 years but this visualisation opened a wide horizon of understanding
Hello JEE aspirant.. I am an aspirant too... did u crack it? Please let me know..😊
@@anonymous20060 I am an aspirant too. I wish they cracked it. How are you studying right now tho?
@@painlesskun3959 more or less good.
Probably the best visualization I've seen yet! Thank you.
The fact that probability is conserved like energy is like the weirdest/coolest weird/cool aspect of quantum mechanics. And understanding probability flow mathematically is probably key to understanding the detailed nature of how electrons mechanic at all, which again is really neat.
So fundamentally the entirety of reality is just probability?
@@aforementioned7177 That's correct but this probability is 100% because probability is conserved at all times.
its not like that. probability is an abstraction. in reality, the particles do exists as an electromagnetic fluid standing wave. trying to find a point in a moving volume of fluid is just misinterpreted as the probability to find the particle. if you try to measure its influence and pin it to a point smaller than its actual influenced volume, then of course it will be a probabilistic distribution.
but its a huge falsehood to interpret these probabilities as physical things. its just an artifact of trying to make a uniform fluid disconnected, point like objects. its just a mechanical wave of a superfluid that is prephysical, meaning that matter is formed out of its nested standing waves, and their fields are the pressure differentials that influence each other.
particles behave like waves because they are waves, not particles. treating them like particles is a macroscopic approximation. really the universe is just a gigantic superfluidic ocean, its waves are are called em waves or gravity waves depending on how they are caused, and matter is just a bunch of mechanical waves with specific wave lengths locked in a a perpetual standing wave. the whole universe with everything inside is a single object, a single fluid, and everything that exists inside it is just a giant compounding standing wave emitting and receiving billions of waves every second.
@@sshreddderr9409 it's an interesting point, but for me, idk, if we can't pierce beyond the veil of the abstraction, does it not then by definition become reality, at least as far as we could 'scientifically prove', Plato's cave allegory and all that -- meaning, we all have two choices; describe the shadow, or make something up, personally I find descriptions of the shadow more real than someone just making something up about where it came from, fun to think about either way though
@@georganatoly6646you would be right if the mainstream pushed abstraction was the best model we could come up with, but its not.
If mainstream scientists would think of the universe as a fluid like people such as Tesla, Maxwell, Faraday etc., particularly a superfluid and tried to understand subatomic phenomena as actions of such , we would have antigravity, nuclear fusion and free energy going mainstream, and with it we could create any material at no cost, need no fuel, and we could have cheap space travel without all the typical issues and dangers.
My "🤯" moment:
Spherical Coordinates @4:05
Your explanation finally made a clear cut distinction between quantum spin and angular momentum vs the classical physics sense of those terms in my brain.
IT FINALLY MAKE SENSE!
yesssssssssss
imma gonna go to four o. five!!
one hour later.
nah, still don't understand it... 😓
Wow this video was extremely cool. You explained the probability current so good.
We're studying "quantum mechanics I" this semester and I'm loving it so far. We have such a great professor. Yes, quantum mechanics is weird but it's also amazing.
That's great! Learning QM properly requires a great professor.
Explained so easily even a tambourine can understand. If you taught, I would attend.
I'm a triangle and I got 'dinged'
Nick is the best teacher. He especially picks very difficult to explain subjects and make them easy for us
he does teach
We bagpipes are still struggling however...
One of the best science educator on TH-cam ❤️😀🤘🏼
Such a great introduction to orbitals. Should be like this on the first semester in Colleges. Would be less boring and abstract
ah, i like how everything about the early comments are simply being early
also, nice video! i don't know much about maths, as my knowledge is limited to high school lessons, but i want to understand the maths part of all these stuff. so thanks for explaining them in a way that doesn't require college level maths
Yes,great video nick.ur just awesome
Saitama
This channel is a simple and less hardcore version of PBS spacetime in my opinion
That's why I like it, it feels refreshing
SIMPLE!!!?
@@alanguile8945 did you ever watched PBS spacetime? This is a breeze compared to it
@@eduardoGentile720 PBS is so hard to keep up with before they take for granted that their viewership has deep maths and physics background...like how can you understand orbital shapes without knowing about spherical coordinates?
I don't know about simpler, but this channel is certainly way better focused. PBS Spacetime is well produced, but I always get the feeling that I was taken on a journey where at the end I'd forgot where I started. Here, I always feel like my time was well spent learning just one new thing.
I think science asylum is way better than PBS Space Time
What an amazing playground of science Nick's brain must be.
I can't begin to tell you how jealous I really am.
I love you Nick! Your videos just keep getting better.
AND it only helps that I've just started Quantum Mechanics and Statistical Mechanics at uni!! Keep em coming!
This was a triumph. I'm making a note here: "Huge success". It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.
Aperture Science, we do what we must because we can
@@naturegirl1999 For the good of all of us except the ones who are dead
@@danielpas368 but there’s no use crying over every mistake
Man!! This his content is too underrated !!!!!
Ur the one who teaches in the simplest ways ! Love your content !!!
I wish this video was a couple hours longer, im taking physical chemistry in university right now and this video definitely helped simplify such an abstract concept
it's fkn incredible that we basically worked all this out over the course of 100 years.
You are making me think that we must learn everything like a child. Ask, reason it, think, play with it, enjoy it.
Worth watching your wonderful channel
You really help even smooth brain types like myself to understand these types of complicated subjects a little better. Thanks for what you do here Nick.
"I mean with such a simple image there could be cake in there"
Literally LOL
I really appreciate your work.🙌🙌🙌
me too
WHY CANT MY QUANTUM PROFESSOR TEACH LIKE YOU DO??!!! Awesome stuff, I've been stuck on fully conceptualizing spherical harmonics for hours, you're a lifesaver!
My God!! I never expected to have this much of understanding in this topic.... without visual info it's really hard to get those ideas around. Kudos to the physicists who came up with this at those times without computers to visualize...
"position is a pretty pointless property" I just want everyone else to appreciate the cleverness of this pun
Yes it was an excellent pun... But I was a bit disappointed, I was hoping for some explanation about how the electrons travel around the nucleus. I am a lay person with only basic understanding of physics, and I grew up at a time when we all learned the Bohr model (even though quantum physics was already well established), and so have always had the planetary system image in my mind...
So I came to this video hoping to get some idea of how the electron behaves through time. Does it just randomly appear at any of the locations in the probability cloud, magically blipping from one location to another? Or does it travel in some random path between these points?
@@NondescriptMammal goog question.
Nice Nick! Probabilities [square of wave function] are deterministic, well said!
Those are not spheres in the electrone microscope image! Those are HEXAGONS! Hexagons are bestagons after all...
I saw that comment on another thread .... something about Parabola and Hexagons lol :-)
A hexagon is just a low-poly circle
@@foldr431 Hexagons stacked next to each other fill a plane completely. Circles have no such power, and in their imperfection they leave holes.
@@foldr431 a circle is an infinite one :-)
"Quantum mechanics is weird y'all"
-Nick Lucid
I loved how Nick includes the Easter egg "The Cake is a Lie" from Portal.
this is another helpful visual to imagine what atoms really look like. Thanks! For those who may hate dot structures just want to say the classic diagrams are DIAGRAMS.they are a tool , no one is claiming that a diagram is what something really looks like. Think of a blueprint, no one looks at it and rages at an architect that THAT'S NOT WHAT A HOUSE REALLY LOOKS LIKE!
Good analogy with the blueprint 👍. Whenever commenters ask what an atom actually looks like, I have to say "It doesn't look like anything." For something to have an appearance, light has to interact with it in a similar way to everyday objects. Atoms don't do that. Diagrams are all we've got.
wow love it @@@ScienceAsylum
In my high school chemistry class, they always taught it that protons and neutrons are little balls stuck together and the electrons are also even smaller balls that orbit around the nucleus. I just wish they had at least mentioned all the weird quantum stuff even if just as a side note.
I'm surprised they didn't mention orbitals at the end of the class. It usually comes up _eventually,_ though they don't go into much detail.
Thumbs UP for the "Cake is a Lie" reference (Portal is still a great game for nowadays standard).
Too shame that greedy Gabe destroyed great studio
Portal references are an automatic upvote from me. You EARNED this, Science Man.
This is by far my favorite video about atomic orbitals! Thank you so much for the explanation! I wish I’d found this in the beginning of my studies
Glad it was helpful! 🤓
3:08 That Panic Clone! Caught me off-guard XD I kinda had the same reaction too!
4:42 & 7:49 "Radial Coords" & "Probability Current" : That's just so beautiful!
"The people have no particles to measure!"
"Then let them measure cake."
Marie Currie Antoinette?
@@SeekNKnow Haha! Nice.
"If particles were made of cake I wouldn't be showing them to you" (c)
Loved it -- one of the best ever. Relaxed, very funny, informative, your "double" - good acting, in summary -- outstanding and thank you a lot
Another great vid Nick , and I loved your comment around the 02.57 mark, I’ve always thought to myself that quantum mechanics would be so much easier if no one cared where the Electron was , you’ve come out and said my own thoughts lol 😂
One of the best explanations for atomic orbitals ive ever seen or heard and ive heard ALOT
Aaaah, Myst! Happy memories.
The cake is in a superposition of "a lie" and "not a lie".
lien't
It is a portal reference
Until I open the box and eat it.
1:09 The cake is a lie! - Great reference to Portal 2 :) and later Myst! - Guess that's why I like your videos so much. Thanks
Portal 1, dude. Get with it! ;)
And his outro plug was for "can an AI be alive"... It is a layer cake ;)
"Events ate probabilistic, probabilities are deterministic"
-Nick Lucid
I' ve already read that quote in a book of some Physicist, gotta be Schrodinger or Feynman, so Nick trolled us ahahahah
The way you connect with people is amazing
Haha, Science Asylum feeling the heat from Sabine Hossenfelder.
They missed an opportunity for a great co-op, didn't they?
Lol yes I was just watching Sabine’s take on this very topic and thought I wonder how Nick would explain this and then , as if by magic, this video dropped . What’s the probability of that?
her free will take was pretty poo
Fantastic explanation. This guy is a genius! Plus, I love the Timeline! Reminds me of the Wayback Machine of Professor Peabody from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show. To the Timeline, y'all! 😃❤
"The cake is a lie" - did not expect a Portal reference 👍
dude just defined heisenberg;s uncertainity in just a few lines dam'n you gained a new subscriber
Literally I want to sit with this guy for hours and wanna understand all this...best visualization of I have ever seen till now....❤
One of the best Science dudes on TH-cam. And rarest amongst all because the depth of explanation and visualization he presented along with pretty clones and humours is really an ultimate amalgamation of a science mentor!
"We generally don't look because we want the position to be uncertain"
I'm guessing that's an exploitation of the uncertainty principle and the use of the Fourier transform that converts a highly delocalized position into a localized momentum. With maximum uncertainty in position you get minimum uncertainty in momentum which is the more practically useful metric.
*Correct*
Yes, but the uncertainty principle isn't just about position with momentum. There's a general version that lets you relate any property with any other property. The cool thing is that some of them result in a zero, which means they share states (like energy and orbital angular momentum).
@@ScienceAsylum What do you mean by "share states"? That there's no uncertainty and so we can measure them both at once?
@@Lucky10279 I mean that the stationary states for one property are actually the same states for the other property.
@@ScienceAsylum But how can that be when they have different units?
Honestly, I wish this is how physics was taught in school. The intuition is completely missing.
You sir , made the whole mess of my brain clear about the orbital. I had consulted my seniors about this and my friends and they similarly said the same thing but u couldn't visualise it. You did it good!
i'm Glad you made this video, I was trying to wrap my head around what orbitals actually are.
"But there's no sense crying
Over every mistake
You just keep on trying
Till you run out of cake" - GLaDOS
🤣
Nice Video👍😅
I can't believe people are still keeping that meme alive
The spherical harmonics also occur at the opposite end of scale: analysing the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background.
Isn't that (at least suspected to be) because the CMB reflects the state of the universe when the whole observable universe was at a size that puts it in the quantum scale, and so prone to quantum effects?
@@ulti-mantis Not as far as I know.
The CMB that we can observe is roughly a sphere cross-section of the early universe, and spherical harmonics are a way to analyse anything that varies over the surface of a sphere.
Electron orbitals are generated by the spherically-symmetric field of the nucleus, which is presumably why they match up to spherical harmonics too.
Because they are a good basis for 3D series expansions and everyone like to confuse elements expansion with physical entities.
"Nick Lucid is weird y'all!"
-Quantum mechanics
Also true.
For a guy about 3⁰ off center, he sure gives a coherent and intuitive explanation of orbitals. What's interests me is that this part of the explanation of orbitals is very little changed from what I was shown 50 years ago, while taking Physical Chemistry at Univ. of Ca. This, and basic thermodynamics haven't changed, it seems. Everything beyond here, though is a brave new world, for me.
I note that everyone's talking about "life". I used my B.S. in chemistry in 1971 to get into med school; my B.S. and my M.D. have given me a keen interest in the idea of "life". And I think Life is more of an idea than a thing. If a complex entity composed mostly of carbon-based molecules capable of interacting with other carbon-based molecules acting as "enzymes" can (1) acquire and manipulate energy via organic-phosphate chemical bonds, and if the entity can (2) channel the harvested energy into physical processes like locomotion, harvesting of MORE energy rich complex molecules (i.e. eating), and if it can (3) redirect that energy back into #1 and #2, and into the biochemical processes that sustain the machinery to accomplish #1 and #2, then it has "life". "Life" is simply the amalgamation of processes and their supporting structures in a way that allows the entity to maintain an overall entropy less than the cumulative entropy of the environment in which it sits.
That should not be a sustainable state, unless the entity harvests energy from it's "food", i.e. gives entropy to the environment. On a macro level that looks like eating, the entity taking in complex molecules, breaking down the food's organization thereby giving unwanted entropy to the disassembled food. If you graph the inverse of entropy (S) vertically against time horizontally, our molecular-biological entity is standing on a peak of 1/S, and balancing in this low entropy (i.e. unlikely) position by eating and harvesting electrons that are put to use maintaining this balance. The electrons stripped from the food are exchanged for entropy. The electrons' energy is cycled back into these processes, repeating endlessly. The order embodied in the "food" is returned to the environment as an increase in entropy. Living beings are simply entropy mills, themselves thermodynamically unlikely, but facilitating an increase in entropy for the overall system. THAT is the meaning of life. Dostoevsky might not agree.
I just watched this video again. This is a great video Nick.
0:48 there should be Scanning Tunneling Microscope or Atomic Force Microscope
I corrected this in the pinned comment. Thank you.
Dude, this is one of the best videos youve ever done.
Again, youre the best science channel on youtube, in a way that you always go DEEPER, but never lose the clarity of the explanation.
Thanks! 🤓
You'll never truly comprehend or appreciate physics if you shun math. Make friends with it.
yeah yeah yeah, I know,
I know...
I'm so lax......
If math wants friends it must learn to be friendly
@@localverse ikr why does it always have to be so mean...
People say you are cringy, well I agree so. But, if you were not cringy and fun, it would be like a 70 years old professor mumbling science things. The fact that you are cringy IS the fact that you are one of the most beautiful science channels for me. I just wanted to mention it because so many people insult you that way, but as I said it is a relief that you are not boring
WOW, both Portal 1:04 and MYST 1:50 references in one episode, and the mind blowing fact that "position is a pretty pointless property" 2:55. Let your probability flow like a mountain stream!
I love that you're getting more into the math in your videos. I've said it before but I'll say it again -- understanding the maths everything start to make so much more sense in physics, especially QM. It's so different from our every day experience that the math is the only way to really get an intuition for what's going on.
When I took organic chemistry in undergrad, I came up with my own way of visualizing and intuiting the behavior of electrons by imagining them as water flowing around planets, and I would imagine larger planets for the more electronegative elements. My model was so effective that I made the highest grade at the end of the semester out of about 175 students who took the course.
Nice video, thanks! just a question: We know that the energy is quantized so it has definite values, then does this probability "transition" have a changing value of energy? or does it keep the initial value of energy during the transition and will change the initial value of energy only when it reaches it's final state?
Energy only has definitely values when the electron is in an energy state. During the transition, the electron is in a superposition of energy states, so it doesn't have a definite energy.
I got it! thanks :)
You had me at cake and blew my mind at 4:40, in two years each of undergraduate chemistry, math, and physics courses, I never caught that as being how those orbital diagrams are plotted.
I was impressed with the visualization of probability current. This might be the best visualization of a concept in QM that is well understood mathematically yet defies our intuition and conceptualization. Awesome!
1:09 I'm crying.... :D
I don't know if the cake is a lie but as someone who teaches high school chemistry and physical science the more of your videos i watch the more i realize that my job is basically to lie to children.
Keep up the great work!
That's the art of teaching, Zack: Knowing exactly how much to lie. You've got to make what you're saying believable in the limited time that you have to explain it.
Why lie? Why not make it clear it's a simplification of a more complex idea? It's what I do with Private Pilot Aerodynamic theory. I'm not going to get into advanced math to explain lift, but I am going to tell them there is advanced math to deeply understand it, but here's a basic way of thinking about it unless you want to publish a paper on aerodynamics. Sometimes the students better at higher maths than I am become interested enough to learn more about it.
Sometimes just knowing there's somewhere further to go engages people more than a half explanation.
@@mzaite I do tell them that, calling it lying was somewhat exaggerating for humor.
@@Cogline6 Besides we all know the Real lying happens in History and Civics Class :)
And Home Ec. Never actually buy the giant sized tube of toothpaste, it's not cheaper and it's gonna get gross way before you finish it!
@@mzaite because you can do better things with your time than preface every statement with "this is a simplified version of how things were once thought to have worked back in the day, it's pretty true and gives us a good idea for how things work, but keep in mind that newer theories have disproved/reworked/remodeled the idea".
disclaimer : electrons are socially anxious
Best video i have ever seen on orbitals and quantum
I love your channel, it makes things easy to understand for people without a background, tysm
You're very welcome! 🤓
"The cake is fake, and the pi is a lie." - Some weird dude
The cake is a lie is a portal reference
@@ant_six I know.. just wanted add to it.
2:55 "position is a pretty pointless property" I see what you did.
According to Star Trek: Discovery, "Cake is eternal". Thus, it cannot be a lie.
3:08 - Made me laugh out loud! Gosh your videos are so informative, and the humor is much appreciated.
Glad you enjoy it! 😆
Nick, you're simply the best. Your way of explaining complex matter is unbeatable! At least in my case ;-). Thanks for all the effort! It's really worth!!!
Thanks! 🤓
Great video. But, let's not detract chemistry. In Pchem courses you get a taste of all this, and also molecular orbitals, which in my opinion are even more exciting.
Yes! Without the quantum behaviour of covalent bonds, we wouldn't have organic chemistry or life as we know it!
1:52 I love this face! 🤣🤣🤣
The cake is truth, portals are the lie. Long live cake!
Flow of probability. Well, well. Another new concept. So cool.
These videos are so good I feel obliged to watch all the ads as well to encourage your sponsors to keep assisting the asylum in making them..... Take note you sponsors this is not just enjoyable funstuff but also brilliantly educational, but details of your book(s) would be appreciated so I can buy them for my upcoming birthday...... Sure beats the heck out of socks and sweaters !
Is the cake a lie?
Idk...i feel that my life before that video is a lie...how come nobody(at any level of teaching) takes the time to show what spherical coordonates are?? How can you understand shapes and what angular momentum in quantum physics without that piece of info??
Because teaching a monkey a trick is way easier than teaching a monkey to actually understand. And our school systems are such that the you only pass a class if you can do the mathematical tricks, even if you are completely clueless as to what the tricks are for
The cake is a lie😭😢
No. It's shown after credits (game "Portal").
When you are too early and don't know what to comment
Ikr
Sometimes I comment then edit it later x)
@@YounesLayachi the contents of the comment cannot be known until observed.
@@YouCanHasAccount Discussion ensues: Super Position of "The Wave Function" collapses when observation limits to a static value
4:07 Mr. Piccolo clone! 😁 Awesome video as usual, greetings from Scotland
iam a 12th student from india and also a science freak
the topics in our books are absurd but you give us the real meaning.ur great dude. i want guys like u to come up
1:14, I think you meant Up Quarks, Down Quarks and Electrons (And Gluons, don't forget Gluons). ;P
Not really. An atom is made up of the subatomic particles Electrons, Protons and Neutrons. Protons and Neutrons are them self made up of elementary particles called Quarks. This fact doesn't make the previous statement wrong.
@@ResandOuies Yep, I just eliminated the middlemen :D
@@Katniss218 Can't realllllyy do that though, any more than you could describe a car as "a lump of metal, glass and rubber". I mean sure that's true, but eliminating the middlemen (ie: the structure) kind of loses a lot of rather relevant information).
(PS: I do realize it was a joke and chuckled a bit myself. Just being pedantic).
@@altrag Yeah, that was the entire point of it.