Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows

Similar to why the electron in a hydrogen atom doesn't keep emitting radiation and crash into the nucleus once it reaches its ground state... there's no lower state for it to jump to.

so the real world impact is, having anything at all

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.

I also had an amazing physics professor who was able to tie literally everything we learned back to real practical and observable events. There is an art to teaching these subjects. This is all undergrad level though, and it wasn’t my major.

General physics and chemistry take different approaches forced by the subject matter. Physics abstracts to problems over concepts with details abstracted away, but at higher levels of education you learn to apply these corrections.

Chemistry starts with practical reality and a lot of rote memorization. Only at the higher levels do you get the unifying theory. Since the unifying theory is quantum electrodynamics (in this case, relativistic QED), that makes sense.

I hated these sorts off classes, where if you had your notes with you, you'd ace the exam and be able to explain everything. Passing or failing depended not on understanding, but simply whether you cram all the specifics and covered edge cases all into your head at once, given the rest of your present courseload preventing you from actually digging in to the best you could. Wrong answers didn't come from not knowing how to solve something, but not remembering exactly how to solve something.

To not have to resort to rote memorization you first have to have the interest. That way you accumulate the knowledge over time, then the patterns feel logical at some point. The logic isn't very precise, maybe that's where you have problems? Some molecules are similar in some molecules in this regard and other molecules in another regard. You will get a feel how stuff behaves. You certainly have a lot of chemistry knowledge you are not aware of.

For example, I'm sure you have a good intuition how things burn and you probably know the basics of why it burns. The invisible oxygen in the air is the main chemical insight to explain why stuff burns. You can explain the whole process to whatever detail you like with physics, but many chemists lack the math and physics knowledge to do much of that.

Yes.

I have a B.Sc in Chemistry (Honours) from late 1980s and it was not until the final year that things finally began to click. The main catalysts were the books "Concise Inorganic Chemistry by J.D.Lee" and "Mechanism in Organic Chemistry by Peter Sykes". Both beautifully written and try to give a framework within which to think viz. the former based on the periodic table and the latter on carbon valence bond properties. I think i need to revisit these (and other books) to justify my degree in Chemistry :-)

For background and inspiration, consult Linus Pauling's classics; The Nature of the Chemical Bond and General Chemistry - https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Pauling+Linus%...

Linus Pauling (the only scientist in history to be awarded two undivided, unshared Nobel Prizes) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling

* David Griffiths - Introduction to Elementary Particles

* Chris Quigg - Gauge Theories of the Strong, Weak, and Electromagnetic Interactions

And the wonderful Richard Behiel's videos on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Iu74b5iCuQ

The idea is that it has not a clearly definite position, but it has a distribution of probability to find it that looks like a "cloud" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital

In a more abstract sense, has not a clearly definite speed, but it has a distribution of probability to find it in a speed graphic.

The distribution of position and speed are defined by an equation and you must add a relativistic correction to the classic version. For lighter atoms you can just ignore the correction. For heavy atom (like Bismuth in this case) the correction is important.

Informally, the correction is important only when the "average" speed is fast enough to be somewhat close to the speed of light, like 50%c.

The correction changes the energy of the expected distribution of position and speed, and the energy. When an electron jumps from an orbital to another orbital, the difference of energies is related to the color.

> Are all atoms on a piece of gold being “observed” in the quantum sense??

[Ignoring that "observer" is a very misleading word and causes a lot of confusion, but it's the standard one and we are stick with it...]

The observation is only of the energy level of the orbital electron. We know the energy, but we don't know the position or the speed. When you observe some quantum object you don't get magically all the properties, only one of them, in this case the energy. In other experiments you can get only the position, in others only the speed. [And there are a lot of weird cases and technical details.]

Re "observed all the time": when gold interacts with light, the light's normally of a strength that's a small perturbation on the fields internal to the atom, which is basically why you can treat the atom/light-field system as two weakly coupled quantum systems. It's an "observation" when the light leaves a classical trace such as a current in a CCD.

(I don't expect this to leave you unmystified about QM, but hopefully a bit clearer about it.)