On the quantum mechanics thing?


https://www.amazon.com/Physical-Chemistry-Molecular-Donald-McQuarrie/dp/0935702997

This was my physical chemistry text book this last year. The computational chemist at my school swears by it as the best p-chem book you can get. You don't need to know any chemistry to get through the first 10 chapters where it explains the schrodinger equation. If you have calculus and some physics it's very clear and easy to follow.

The long and short of it is for a hydrogen atom, a one electron one nucleus system, you can get exact solutions to the schrodinger equation. However once you get up to Helium, 2 electrons and 1 nuclus, you hit the 3-body problem which cannot be solved exactly so you have to start employing variational or perturbation theory to solve.

However, even though the hydrogen atom can be solved exactly even if you had a hydrogen atom it would still be slightly overlapping with every other wave function from every other electron in existence, so even if it might behave very ideally, on some level it wouldn't due to the slight bond character it would have with even the walls of the container.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Jun 10 2016 11:15pm

Thanks for the info.

But not experimentally, but theoretically are there inaccuracies with the theories?

It doesn't account for any relativistic effects. Even using very good approximation methods atoms like Mercury are smaller than predicted when measured because electrons moving in the outer shell are at ~0.2x the speed of light and thus are more massive than a regular electron.

What about relativistic quantum field theory?

I don't know about that. I'm just talking about quantum mechanics we use in chemistry. You can't start at the Schrodinger equation like in quantum mechanics and get truth. You have to start further down in physics, probably what you are talking about.

From my understanding the Schrodinger equation explains everything that exists.

I'd say that understanding is incorrect. We can't actually test the Schrodinger equation for anything more than a single hydrogen atom or the equations become unsolvable.

How can something orbit around us if we're flat..?

Not a smart theory..

The Schrodinger equation is also only used to determine the energy of a system. It doesn't tell us anything else about the system except that.

I'm not sure that untestability implies falsity.

I'm also not sure it's untestable but that's something to be determined in the future.