Sean Carroll

And it was finally Louis de Broglie and later Erwin Schrodinger who elaborated on this idea that said, let's think about electrons as waves rather than particles.

And we started talking about what is called the wave function of the electron.

And there's a very bad name, the wave function.

It's not nearly evocative enough for such a centrally important concept.

But there you go.

There you have it.

And it's also a little bit misleading for a reason I will tell you.

But let's first give the true but somewhat misleading story.

think about the electron as kind of a wave that lives in the vicinity of the nucleus of the atom.

And what Schrodinger did was provide an equation that this wave, this function, it's a complex valued function, but that's not gonna be important for anything we do.

Schrodinger's equation tells us the allowed solutions to different ways the electrons can behave.

And if you've ever taken a chemistry class and you've learned about the orbitals of different electrons and atoms, really those are all just different solutions to Schrodinger's equation.

And it all fit the data very nicely, you know, because electrons could go from one energy level, one orbit to another one and emit certain amounts of light.

And we observed exactly those amounts of light in the spectrum of the various substances.

And so it's quantitatively super duper successful.

The problem is, of course, that when we

look at electrons, we don't see the wave function.

We see a dot.

We see the electron located at a point.

And this is all of the mystery of quantum mechanics.