Very cool.
The paper PDF: https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.brown.edu/dist/0/196/fil...
For instance, we know that gold gets its color from relativistic effects.
“This idea that relativity is important in heavy elements has been around since the 1970s,” said Lai-Sheng Wang, a professor of chemistry at Brown and the study’s corresponding author. “But we show direct spectroscopic evidence that what we learned in high school about chemical bonding isn’t true in heavy elements."
kristianp•1h ago
> In the relativistic regime, an electron’s spin — the magnetic moment that points either up or down — and the electron’s orbit are no longer independent of each other, a state known as spin-orbit coupling.
Interesting stuff. I've never heard of sigma or pi bonds.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aei1285
aaaronic•38m ago
nomel•31m ago
If I would have stuck with it, would things have improved?
timcobb•29m ago
lacunary•27m ago
ajkjk•21m ago
Of course, they could still do a much better job useful providing pointers into this knowledge, instead of just handwaving over it and insisting on rote memorization.
aaaronic•19m ago
nerdsniper•10m ago
The curious always wanted to know why some magic coefficient was there. Where did it come from? How is it measured / calculated? How to derive the magic coefficient?
Eventually you learn that it’s turtles all the down. You can pick apart the magic coefficient and dive into the nuanced physics that its derived from…but then you still end up with a new magic coefficient.
So eventually, the curious students learn that the mysteries are out there for when you want to go out and explore them. But otherwise, we pick our level of abstraction for the problem we’re currently working on and accept the magic coefficients that apply to that level of abstraction.
The real trick is knowing the conditional boundaries when those magic coefficients no longed apply and you either need different ones or “here be dragons”.
loeg•3m ago