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3 comments

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• 1
  John Duffield Mar 5, 2013 9:11 PM United Kingdom

  I'm not sure that this soundbite delivers much in the way of understanding. Hmmn. OK, start your clock:
  
  See electron diffraction on wikipedia. We can diffract electrons, and make them interfere with one another, because they're waves, not point particles. Then see atomic orbitals and pay careful attention to this sentence: The electrons do not orbit the nucleus in the sense of a planet orbiting the sun, but instead exist as standing waves. Then think about pair production where we can create an electron and a positron from two photons, and electron-positron annihilation which typically results in two photons. Note that photons have a wavelength and a frequency, and are electromagnbetic waves rather than point-particles. With evidence supplied by electron magnetic dipole moment and the Einstein-de Haas effect, it's pretty obvious that even when not within a nucleus, the electron exists as a standing wave. You tend not to see too much about standing-wave electrons in physics texts, but here's something in an online chemistry textbook. Note though that since the electron has a quasi spherical symmetry, it isn't a standing wave going back and forth like in an optical cavity. It's going round and round orthogonally, hence spherical harmonics. Harmonics are all to do with ratios, so when an electromagnetic wave going round and round at c absorbs another electromagnetic wave propagating linearly at c, it effectively changes gear. That's a quantum jump.

  Edited by John Duffield on Mar 5, 2013 9:12 PM.

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• 2
  M. Asghar Mar 6, 2013 12:01 PM

  Reason of transition

  The instantaneous transition of an electron from one state to another is not by itself, but is processed through the dipole moment of vacuum coulomb field that interacts with the electron dipole moment in its orbit. One can modify this instantaneousness at will as is often done in the "cavity QED" work. In fact, if there were no vacuum coulomb field to interact with,there would be no transition at all!

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• 3
  walkerlee Mar 10, 2013 1:49 AM

  Energy levels in waves

  Is there a formula that would describe the conversion of a normal distribution curve to a sine wave, and from this relatively high amplitude and low frequency sine wave to lower amplitude and higher frequency sine wave? I notice this effect and looking into what is known about it.
  If you like standing waves being converted to higher energy standing wave and how it was made from a material buckled into a bell curve you may want to view this video.
  
  youtu.be…wrBsqiE0vG4

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