Fallout 4 and Atoms part 2

So Fallout 4 came out yesterday, for those of you who don't know, that is a video game. The idea of the fallout series in general was to take the fear of the nuclear apocalypse that haunted people from the 50s riiight the way through to the end of the cold war, and then make it into a fun playable experience.

See as the name suggests (fallout means the radioactive particles that fall as dust or rain after a nuclear weapon is detonated), the fallout series are all set in a world similar to that of the 1960s, except the nuclear war actually happened and now it is a wasteland.

I'm not just telling you this because I'm a nerd, the point which I am making is that this is a truly brilliant game, the gameplay is immersive, there is plenty of stuff to do, and the trailer below has me still humming the wanderer.

However the thing that appeals to me most about fallout 4 is that its a NUCLEAR apocalypse. Not zombies or aliens or ancient artifacts but good old fashioned nuclear war between America and China that wipes out the world in 2 hours and is followed by crazy survivor attempts to mutate humans into super-soldiers and to create deadly viral weapons.

So pretty simple idea - pretty fantastic game series.

You know the announcement of fallout 4 and the nuclear bombs that caused the series were actually what caused me to google atoms and write these posts on all this stuff.

Anyway I'm getting a little off topic, to tell the truth that was all mainly a filler because this post may not be as long as the last one see this post, I am going to cover the other model of the atom in use today, the quantum mechanical model.

Back in a simpler time you could ask any physicist what is the difference between some light and this electron and they would have said that one is a wave whereas the other is a particle, but then physics once more got in the way of our nice simple view of the world.

See there is this weird phenomenon called the photoelectric effect that helped to muck up our nice simple view. To put it simply, when you shine light above a certain frequency (and therefore energy) on a metal's surface, there are electrons emitted instantaneously. Now some of you might be thinking its just like boiling off water, the light gives it thermal energy and so the electrons have enough energy to escape, but the weird thing wasn't the emission, it was the fact that it occurred instantaneously. Even with the biggest oven in the world, there would be a gap in time before the metal was heated and the electrons boiled off, so what exactly is going on here?

It was a guy called Plank's hypothesis that helped us to understand what was going on here, as he suggested that light was less of a wave of energy and more like a massive stream of quantised packets of energy, like how a river flowing looks like a liquid, but in fact is made up of trillions of H2O molecules.

But why is this so important? Well the higher the frequency, the more energy these packets will be carrying, which means that above a certain energy, they would provide exactly the amount of energy that an electron would need to escape the positive pull of the surface of the metal. We refer to this amount of energy as the work function. However the key thing to take from this is that light doesn't always behave like a wave, sometimes it behaves like particles.

The second thing that began to mess with our heads was much simpler, what happens when you shoot a beam of electrons at a disk shaped target? Well up until they hit the target, they act completely normal, flying along in a straight line, but when they hit the target, something bizarre happens, specifically this:

Whats so weird about this you ask? This is the pattern which scattered light makes when it is diffracted. And therefore the electrons are no longer acting like a particle, but like a wave instead.

From these two seemingly small things, some very clever people were able to draft up the theory of what we know as the wave particle duality, the idea that waves and particles can be equated as one thing in a similar way to how Einstein equated matter and energy. In order to do this, DeBroglie created a very interesting equation:

Which is in summary wavelength is equal to Planck's constant over mass times velocity. Or to the non physics people, waves and particles pretend to be each other.

What does this have to do with atoms you ask? Well many more equations were made until eventually we became able to actually write a particle as a wave of probability, stating effectively how much of the particle is there. And the particles we can do this with include electrons.

So last time I showed you the electrons in nice tidy orbitals, whereas the quantum model of the atom takes into account the fact that electrons could be wavey and makes it look like this instead:


And when there is more than one they will still repel, despite being merely a cloud of charge and will form all the pretty patterns on the right. depending on how many are present. to be as far away from each other as possible, much like two arguing siblings.

And that is how simple the quantum model of the atom gets, well now hopefully you understand atoms just a little bit better now.

You know whats a weird thought? Just how complex such an incredibly small system can even be, there was a time that the atoms were thought of as indivisible, but over time we have come to discover that even these tiny little bits of stuff are even more unimaginably complex than we could ever manage to completely understand.

Once again it has been a pleasure writing and thank you all for reading, see you soon :)