Or in other words which forces keep electrons in orbitals and prevent it from flying away or crashing into the nucleus according to modern understanding?

  • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Yes, there are an infinite number of velocities you can use, but if you look at their distribution, you’ll find that it quickly goes to zero somewhere around 1-2 m/s, so the expectation value of the velocity is convergent.

    If you have an object with a velocity taken from a distribution that doesn’t approach zero sufficiently fast as the velocity goes to infinity, the expectation value diverges. A simple example would be a person that would be half as likely to get up at a velocity of 2 m/s as 1 m/s, and half as likely to get up at 4 m/s as 2 m/s, etc.

    The more mathematical version of the same argument is to compute the energy of a particle who’s wavefunction is a delta pulse, and you’ll find that the particle has infinite energy.