NOVA scienceNOW | Amazing Atoms | PBS

http://www.pbs.org/nova/sciencenow Throw away your textbooks. Here is the latest, atomically correct, version of our old friend, the atom. Don't miss the new season of NOVA scienceNOW, airing every Wednesday starting June 25 on PBS.

Watch past episodes of the program, try out interactives, and more on our Web site: http://www.pbs.org/nova/sciencenow

NOVA is produced by WGBH in Boston. Funding for NOVA scienceNOW is provided by Pfizer, the National Science Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and public television viewers.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• amazing
• atom
• electron
• fun
• molecule
• nova
• now
• orbit
• pbs
• proton
• real
• scale
• science

[TheIxtlan]

Yea, quantum mechanics, we are really not here. Ignore this comment, it does not exists.

[Jim1905]

That's not really correct, the matter exists in all states as a wavefunction until it collaspes at a single point but even that's not quite correct either. QM blows my mind and now i have mind all over me...

[911totallyawesome]

I was going to make a joke about science, but all the other good ones argon...

[StellerNova]

@bot06 "they" just taught you what they were taught.

[bot06]

Why did they taught us wrong model of atom at school? Also this means Bohr's atomic model is wrong too. This s what they taught us.

[mphello]

So the factually correct model of the atom has homeless guys peeing on the electron orbitals?

[theOGslagster127]

why they disable comments on their dark matter video?

just wanted to slag em re purple an light blue galactic balls in cosmologically red bigger-buckets - talk about colour clash - these are the scientists to extoll dark theoy since clearly colour is beyond them!

[TheGodlessGuitarist]

@Jim1905

"it is entirely possible that there are an infinite amount of other universes with different states ..."

Well I din't discriminate. 'Universe' means everything, and there can only one of those lol

I think this concept of alternate expansions suffers from the same problem of choice. It also takes us away from the concept of a theory of everything, and to quote Lawrence Krauss, to "a theory of anything". Which is philsophically disturbing lol

[Jim1905]

@TheGodlessGuitarist

"Whatever theory is at the frontier of understanding is inherently a shut-up and calculate theory"

QM is a pretty venerable theory considering it's been around for about a hundered years now, it actually has more to do with the fact that the standard interpretation of QM, the copenhagen one, is inherently a shut up and calculate type of theory.

[Jim1905]

@TheGodlessGuitarist

That's assuming when we time travel we stay in the same universe, it is entirely possible that there are an infinite amount of other universes with different states at any one moment in time that can be traversed to. Travelling backwards in time may be no different then travelling forwards. GR has more to say about this then QM does

[Jim1905]

@TheGodlessGuitarist

No GR is waay more well defined, it fully unifies space and time, is completely background independent, meaning you don't have to describe the geometry first and gives a complete understanding of what gravitation is. I don't have a clue what a prob cloud is, that's not even something that can exist, there are so many interpretations of QM: Many-world, Many-histories, Copenhagen, de broglie-bohm theory, etc. and not one can be uniquely determined to be correct

[TheGodlessGuitarist]

@Jim1905

"QM is a shut-up and calculate kind of theory"

Well, things are explained in terms of more fundamental things. Whatever theory is at the frontier of understanding is inherently a shut-up and calculate theory. Relativity is no better visualized than QM to me understanding. The stretchy nets of classic relativity explanations seem to me to be no more enlightening than probability clouds in QM.