“Draw me an atom”
This amazing gif by xverdxse is close to my idea of what an atom looks like. Far from the schoolbook picture of a clump of snooker ball protons and neutrons encircled by hoops of electrons the real picture of an atom is more like a vibrating cloud. A cloud? Yeah, a specific type of cloud called a probability density function. Woah maths alert! WEEOO-WEEOO, code red, code red!
Relax.
A probability density function (PDF) is just a measure (function) of how likely it is (probability) to ‘find’ the atom in a given region of space (density). The thickness of the cloud in a small region is proportional to the likelihood of finding the atom centered within that region. In the image above, it is most likely to be found in the center of the black region, and the likelihood of it being found further away gets smaller and smaller until it’s nearly zero outside.
Every frame of this image corresponds to making a single measurement of it’s position. If it weren’t on a loop and we waited long enough, we should expect it to sooner or later make a large jump to a grey or even white area.
This is how quantum tunneling works: a particle confined to a domain will at any given time have a small but finite probability of being found outside its confinement region! Even a tennis ball has a finite (but astronomically tiny) probability of tunneling through a solid wall.
So what do atoms actually look like? Well, they don’t. They area collection of volumeless point-particles that don’t have any physical shape that you can draw on a piece of paper. However they have an effective shape that is described by (amongst other things and depending on what kind of measurements you make) the PDF.
If you take a step back from your screen and look at the above ‘atom’, you can kind of consider it as a single solid entity even though it is an amorphous cloud of pixels. This is all we can say about the ‘true’ shape of the atom and is a visual approximation we have to make if we want to try to understand what atoms look like and not chew off our own faces in philosophical frustration.
#Remember that one time #where a crossdressing gay alien couple was featured in a Disney movie #And no one noticed?
Lilo and Stitch. Great movie. I always thought the ‘couple’ were androgynous.
Via There's a turtle under my bed.
iwannamakelovetogarrettnickelsen:
the thing about Barbie, quite frankly, freaked me out a little
this.is.ridiculous.
everyone should watch this
guess what guise i feel better about myself already
Fuckkk.
This is needed to be watched.
Watch.
I feel better.
I’m in the 3/10.
8/10
EVERYBODY needs to see this RIGHT NOW.
this was beautiful
I absolutely love this.
50%
Made me feel a bit better.
(Source: vimeo.com)
Via There's a turtle under my bed.
Wanna hear the Google Translate woman beatbox? Copy paste this from German to German: pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpvpvzk kkkkk bsch
I nearly died. XD
WHAT IS AIR?!!? XD
i cant even
OMG. I can’t stop listening to it -amused-
I LAUGHED SO FREAKIN HARD.
OMG WHY. LOLOLOL
I LOLED SO HARD THIS MADE MY FUCKING MORNING HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
cool!
Slightly husky, nice baby!
I love dreamers.
Somebody had an idea for a TV show where people could talk into a hand-held communicator and someone on another planet could hear them. ¨Kirk to Enterprise, Beam us up.¨ crazy dream huh? I mean who would believe you can talk into a thing and with no time delay, no wires, no distortion, the other person as far as a planet away could hear you.
Yep dreams are a waste of time.
Kind of like
- Giving laptops away to children across the world in a program called One Laptop Per Child.
- Doing a checkup on a pregnant mum by viewing her live ultrasound from thousands of kilometers away.
- Heating up food without a heater, just using radio waves.
- Turning sunlight into electricity.
- Flying 300 people around the world.
Crazy dreamers.
http://edu-net.nl/Kunst/Schilderijen/Flying%20Machine,%20Leonardo%20da%20Vinci,%201490.jpg
