Invisible wrote:
>>> Wait, back up a sec - you mean there's a *reason* why the transition
>>> metals exist? And people actually know WTF this reason is??
>>
>> Yes.
> 
> OK, that's quite impressive.
> 
> Last time I heard, an atomic nucleous has a cloud of electrons floating
> around it. (Seems reasonable - they're negatively charged, while the
> nucleous is positively charged. Why wouldn't they orbit it?) Except that
> rather than just floating around, they all stay 100% rigidly confined to
> a discrete set of orbit shells. (Um, WTF? Why?) And the inner-most shell
> can only hold 2 electrons (OK), the next shell can only hold 8 (um...
> OK), and next one out also holds 8 (er... why?), and the next shell can
> contain up to 18 electrons but when you start filling that shell you can
> only fill it up to a certain point, and then you have to go back and
> fill the shell below and then you can finish filling this shell (WTF?!)
> And the shell numbers are apparently just plucked out of the air, and
> the shell filling orders are completely arbitrary. And this is all
> assuming an atom with zero energy; apparently real atoms have more
> energy than that, which causes electrons to migrate between different
> shells, and when one falls back to a lower shell it emits energy
> (usually in the form of EMR). And don't even get me started on chemical
> bonding...
> 
> It all seems wildly complicated and completely random.

And now you can see that the electrons are actually in those fields.
http://insidescience.org/research/first_detailed_photos_of_atoms

I had done the math in chem class, I could understand that this model
worked and predicted everything we knew, but seeing these images is
still a stunner.

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