Electron Configuration Flashcards
Max Planck
1900, German. Man who said, “Light travels in tiny packets of energy that I’ll call quanta.” (1= quantum).
quantum
Minimum quantity of energy lost or gained by electrons.
Albert Einstein
1905, German. He renamed quanta to photons and suggested that they acted both like waves and particles. He used Planck’s quanta idea to explain the photoelectric effect.
Niels Bohr
1913, Danish. He explained the line spectra of hydrogen, by theorizing that maybe electrons are only allowed certain amounts of energy (like photons), meaning that they could only be found in certain energy levels around the nucleus.
Ground & excited state
When an atom is energized, the electrons jump to a higher level (excited state), but they don’t have enough energy to stay there so they fall back down (ground state).
Release of light
When electrons jump from ground to excited state, they release extra energy as light. The color of the light emitted depends on which orbit the electron from and to.
Louis deBroglie
1924, French. He said that if light acts like both a wave and a particle, maybe fast moving electrons can also act like waves as they go around the nucleus.
Werner Heisenburg
1927, German. Made the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle.
Heisenburg’s Uncertainty Principle
It’s not possible to measure both the speed and location of an electron at the same time because to measure either, you have to bounce a photon off an electron which changes the electron’s course. The act of measuring one messes up the other.
Edwin Shroedinger
1926, Austrian. Theorized that electrons travel in standing waves as they go around the nucleus. He put all equations for these ideas together and came up with one big equation called the Shroedinger Equation.
Standing waves
Stable waves that bend back on themselves.
Shroedinger Equation
Equation made by Edwin Shroedinger that explained the line spectra of all glowing gases and shows the probable shapes of where the electrons are at any one time as they go around the nucleus.
Dimitri Mendelev
Organized the first periodic table by atomic mass, which showed repeating characteristic properties.He left empty spaces and predicted new elements there.
Periodic Law
Physical and chemical properties of the elements are periodic functions of their atomic numbers.
Henry Mosley
Reorganized the periodic table by atomic number (# of protons).
Sir William Ramsey
Man who proposed the new group noble gases.
Alkali metals
Group One. Silvery appearance, very soft, highly reactive especially with air and water. It is not found alone in nature.
Alkaline earth metals
Group 2. Harder, denser, stronger, have higher melting points, less reactive than alkali metals but still too reactive to be found alone in nature.
Valence electrons
Electrons in the outermost energy levels, involved in chemical reactions and are shared, lost, or gained.
noble gases
Group 18, have 8 valence electrons which is a full octet and is very stable.
d & f blocks
Only 2 valence electrons because they are inside the s orbitals. Their atoms are extra stable if their d or f blocks are halfway or all the way full, so sometimes they’ll steal an electron from the outermost s orbital to make that happen.
electromagnetic spectrum
whole range of electromagnetic radiation
wavelength
distance between two crests of two adjacent waves
