alt Hacker NewsGold electrons at inner orbits travel at a large fraction of the speed of light, which is why gold isn't a silver color. That is really neat.
Gold electrons at inner orbits travel at a large fraction of the speed of light, which is why gold isn't a silver color. That is really neat.
I don’t understand how something that has no clearly defined position like an electron can have a well defined speed. I thought I had understood that at that level, particles are more like clouds, or vibrations in the quantum field, and they had no well defined position until you tried to measure it, causing its cloud to collapse to a smaller region. But if non observed electrons can have a speed that defines the color of a material, that whole understanding seems to be wrong! Where is the error? Are all atoms on a piece of gold being “observed” in the quantum sense?? Even if we just capture the spectrum? Or it’s something else??