It's not about jumps so much, it's about areas which have increased or decreased probabilities for the electron to be in. When an electron gets "promoted" (for instance, when it absorbs light of a specific wavelength), the areas which have a high probability for it to occupy are drastically changed. The wave function alters, and the electron position over time alters generally, not just specifically.
so high probability they'll be in a specific place- that's where the math comes in.. it may not be 100% but it's down to a percentage where they'll end up one of my buddies is a electrical engineer- he understands it a lot better.. I'll ask him about jumping.. the way I always understood it, they disappear and reappear in different shells around an atom I was mainly looking at that jump in between.. why do they go from one to the other instantly he always gives me that your a dumbass look when ask him about these things so maybe I'll stick it in the back of my brain for the right time
There are areas of probability, that's it. The models are very accurate at telling us the regions that electrons will occupy, but it's afaik impossible to tell specific locations actual locations, especially with electrons also being waves. Ask me, I'm a chemist. Electrons don't disappear, they get promoted. Think of it this way, a car (our electron) is going on a circuit which we can not see around a central point (the nucleus). When it's in a low energy state (the car's going slow), we know the car will be in the slow lane of the circuit. But then all of a sudden some godly mechanics swoop in (the photons) and add 50% more power to the engine and the car increases it's speed massively. At this point, we know the electron has to have moved into the fast lane, because now it's higher in energy (car's going fast). We don't know where, because we can't see the track, but we know that it will be somewhere in the fast lane, not in the slow lane, because we know it's got more energy (car's going faster). This is a fair simplification, but it's the best you can do without actually learning some chemistry. This is complicated depending on model usage. But basically, it's not instantly, it's just...well it's nearly instantly. Think about it, we don't actually know where the electrons are, and it's nowhere near as simplistic as my above example. We know they're in general regions of space, and when an electron gets promoted the probabilistically generated general regions it occupies changes instantly, but the physical location of the electron (when viewed as a particle) must transition in consistant manner through space, so this might happen: Electron in ground state flying around atom: Most likely region for electron to occupy: 10-30 picometres from nucleus, with the greater likelyhood the further up you go from 10, and down from 30, to a maximum of 20pm. Actual position: 20 pm from nucleus. So it's at the distance we'd guess it to be if we had to guess. Now: Electron gets promoted! New most likely region: 20-40pm, with likelyhood increasing from 20 and decreasing from 40 to a maximum of 30pm. Now this is where it gets more complicated, because you could say that it's such a fast promotion that it basically instantaneously changes its position, but then an electron is always changing it's position, so there's nothing new there. What we find happens though, is that in incredibly short order, that electron will go from whizzing around the nucleus at a distance of approximately 20pm, and start whizzing around the nucleus at a distance of around 30pm. Again, gross simplification, and I'm missing out all of the actual quantum mechanics and maths, not to mention the fact there are multiple models for pretty much everything in physical chemistry, but whatever.
ok so it's not an instant in between.. I remember my chemistry teacher telling me it was a instant jump.. I'm probably wrong- remember my chemistry teacher had a bad stutter so instant to him might mean something different makes more sense the if it's just a really fast jump in between
Again, depends how you look at it. Once you start treating an electron as a wave, or a general area of charge, it becomes much, much less simple, and far less intuitive.
Well, quantum chemistry on my part. That said, when you get into quantum, the line between physics and chemistry becomes very blurry very fast. I'm a student of chemistry, but this semester I've been being taught crystallography by a reader in physics, and low level quantum mechanics by a computational chemist.
Instead of bombarding terrorist suspects with Barny the dinosaur they should bombard them with quantum physics. It melts your brain and educates you at the same time. Think of the consequences? Any time a group of terrorist got together to discuss a dirty bomb or planting a nuke it would end up in an argument about physics. I wonder what kind of thread drift you get on terrorist forums?
It's not an entirely surprising result in the sense that so many things in life can be explained through physics. My wife's uncle was working toward a PhD in physics. He was a director at an alternative school (think: high school for kids who get kicked out of 'regular' high school), and he was explaining classroom dynamics via chaos theory. He was nearing the end of his dissertation when he suffered a stroke. Chaos is such a bitch.
