(published on 10/22/2007)
(published on 10/22/2007)
(published on 10/22/2007)
(published on 05/16/2013)
Yeah, that orbital stuff is complicated. I'm not sure why it gets introduced so soon in school. There would be a lot of much clearer things to learn.
Just for a little start on orbitals, since something about them was probably assigned, you might look at these pictures of some different orbital shapes that the electron cloud can take: . Orbitals have stable shapes that don't change in time. Other states do change in time.
As for your wishes for science, perhaps providing governments with nuclear weapons was a step in that direction. If they are used, however, there will be collateral damage.
Mike W.
(published on 09/19/2013)
If each shell represented a spherically symmetrical cloud form ("S state"), you'd be right that each would hold only two electrons, given the two spin states. However, there are states that are not spherically symmetric. One way of expressing the P states has two lobes of cloud, with opposite sign of wave in each lobe. There are three independent ways of aligning those lobes, e.g. along x,y, or z axes. By symmetry these all have the same energy. For D states there are more lobes and five independent forms. In the conventional shell language, states that have almost the same energy, such as the lowest energy P states and the second-lowest-energy S states are lumped into the same shell, giving even more states per shell.
Mike W.
(published on 07/06/2016)
Have look at follow-up 1 in this old thread. Maybe it answers your question.
https://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=523 https://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=523
Mike W.
(published on 04/10/2018)