We started out as little cell thingies millions of years ago and now we can scroll through digitized sex acts by the millions.
The universe literally just existed…out of nowhere…NOWHERE [what a funny looking word]! Oh well, back to my 9 - 5, thanks capitalism 🤑👍🏼!
Actually the mechanics are really not that similar at all, the similarities are mostly superficial and due to the fact that both electrostatic and gravitational forces are inverse square laws.
However electrons don’t literally orbit nucleii in circles/ellipses like planets do with stars. That is a simplified picture they teach to kids in school but reality at that quantum level is complicated, and macroscopic laws don’t apply all that well.
For instance a more accurate model is the so-called “Orbital” model which interprets electrons as clouds of probability of various shapes distributed in different patterns around the nucleus. This one is used in chemistry a lot.
There are other ways of looking at “orbiting” electrons, for instance as standing waves in a field. And then you have all the messiness of electrons constantly absorbing and emitting other particles, randomly splitting and re-joining as they travel, etc.
Still, electrons are pretty well understood. Gravity on the other hand is a bit of a head scratcher. Why is it that we have to model it as spacetime curvature? Why doesn’t quantum field theory work on it like it does the other forces? Very frustrating…
I do agree that electron orbits are not like planets since the forces tend to push back if they get too close, but why then do atoms have spin (which can enable ferromagnetism)? EDIT: is it maybe just a certain position/orientation of the electrons that causes that?
By “tend to push back if they get too close” do you mean just regular electrostatic repulsion between like charges, or are you referring to the phenomenon of electron degeneracy pressure? Because the latter is far more interesting. It’s another bit of quantum weirdness resulting from the exclusion principle where two identical electrons will refuse to occupy the same quantum state (same “orbit”) as each other. Keeps white dwarf stars from collapsing into neutron stars and has nothing to do with the regular repellence that identical charges experience.
As for spin, that’s again another very strange property of quantum particles. The spin of an atom is fairly easily explained by the sum of spins of its components (plus a bit from orbital angular momentum) but that just begs the question what it means for an electron to have “spin”? A point charge cannot technically rotate, nevertheless electrons clearly have an intrinsic magnetic dipole moment and this is what we call spin. But the way it behaves is far more interesting than what you would imagine when you picture a macroscopic analog like a planet spinning.
For instance electron spin is fractional and discrete. Its orientation is also changed by measurement in a very similar way to how the polarization of light waves works (because photons also have spin). A downright bizarre consequence of the fractional spin of particles like electrons is that they do not behave under rotation like normal objects do. When you rotate anything in the macroscopic world 360° you end up right where you started. Not so for the wave function of an electron. If you want to “rotate” that “all the way around”, you need to go 720°.
Anyway, just some tidbits i find interesting about this subject.
You explained it very well, thank you!