Could you not measure the amount of time it takes for the electron to jump between orbitals? If its instaneous then you could say the electrons never occupy those forbidden orbitals. If there is a short period in time where the electron cannot be found in either orbital then it most have been somewhere in that time period...correct?

The orbitals are stationary states. They are solutions to an equation in which time does not appear. You are now talking about a kinetic process by which the jump between stationary states occurs. The orbitals described in the talk do not apply rigorously to that process, so saying that the electron is not in an allowed state does not mean it is in a forbidden one.

I do not recall ever seeing an analysis of the time dependent process of emitting a photon and moving between states. The orbitals we are discussing would not apply without modification. Of that, I am almost certain.

Again Stu, you saw a very superficial overview of some aspects of Quantum Mechanics, highly simplified (I might say "over simplified"). You have no chance of taking what you saw in that video and making any kind of reasonable speculation about the processes you are trying to describe. No chance at all. None. Your comments are random and unconnected to the mathematics of quantum mechanics.

Again, I am in no way hostile to your basic beliefs. You are just WAY out of your depth here.

The discussion is more important to me than being right or wrong. But the discussion would be pretty useless too if I just rolled over.

Maybe move it over to SMT? Again, as far as ID goes, I still maintain your argument is basically: this is so complicated, amazing, it must have been designed.

Lets assume that it is such an argument What is wrong with such an argument if the person you are arguing with cannot offer a more plausible explaination?

The discussion is useless whether you roll over or not. You are debating quantum mechanics with physicists, but you do not know any quantum mechanics. How is that a useful discussion? It's like discussing anesthesiology with a witch doctor.

I really wish you would stop. In any event, I am going to stop. It is too painful. All that is happening is that my opinion of you is going down and down and down. Best if I quit.

Its an internet forum, I'm not too concerned if I "go down" or make a fool of myself. What would such an event really cost me? Nothing that I find terribly important.

Anyways they way I see it yours and Max's counter argument amounts too:

A)You don't know quantum mechanics, listen to us because your way out of your league.
B)Reality is that way because our mathematical model says its that way.

Would you agree with this statement:
"Quantum mechanics tells us nothing of why things are the way they are...it is only useful in modeling what we observe"

The question you are asking now is much more complicated than the initial one. It requires quantum field theory and is something that a decent percentage of Phds in physics couldn't give a lecture on. In short, it requires treating the electron and photons as quantizations of an underlying field. I can't really give a yes or no answer because I can only talk about things that we can either directly or indirectly measure and this would require a fair amount of technical details to answer.

On the first point, internet or not I do try not to make a fool of myself. I guess it is a personal preference to think carefully about things before I shoot off my mouth.

On the second point, it may seem like that because you do not know any quantum mechanics. If you did, you would never start down the road you did.

On the third point, of course. Nothing I said or that Max said as I recall is inconsistent with that. QM does not say why an electron has a charge. It only describes the motion of an electron.

If this statement is true it can be said about any scientific idea.

Because for everything that seems amazing, there are plenty of things that, perhaps still amazing, are incredibly flawed.

The mere fact that science doesn't yet have all the answers is not reason enough to say: well, it must have been an intelligent designer then. All it means is that we don't have the answer yet. One day we may have all the answers, or perhaps not.

I really don't know why this is so difficult for theists to accept. You seem to need to have the answer all wrapped up nicely, and if you can't, its a real problem.

atomic orbital

I thought this was pretty cool. Maybe one of the eggheads could describe to us what we are seeing when we watch the animation.

Well, I am not sure if I am one of the eggheads you were asking for, but I think you are looking at pretty colors on a computer screen. My main problem with this video is that the orbitals we have been discussing are stationary states, as I said earlier. They are not time dependent so there is no time evolution to portray.

I think it is BS. I could be wrong though. There would need to be more explanation of how they derived the video for me to be more definite.

The phase of stationary states behaves like e^{iEt/hbar}. The animation includes that phase (no clue what the point of that is).

Grunching after about 17 posts, but you're thinking about it wrong. Electrons don't 'orbit' a nucleus like the moon orbits the earth, thus the question is meaningless.

illustrations of them can be found at :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital