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

This is true, but it does not exclude the ID possibility.

Of course not. But you ignored my first sentence, which is certainly what makes ID less likely:

If God is a perfect designer, there sure seem to be a lot of mistakes and inefficiencies out there!

Which mistakes and inefficiencies?

I do not think that is it although you are correct about the phase factor.

First, the text referred to the video as an "orbital" not a "wavefunction" and also refers to a "cloud of probabilities" so I took that to be the video subject. Probability is psi*psi so the phases disappear and are not observable in the probability distribution.

Second, if you look at the time evolution in the video the symmetry of the orbitals changes from an l=1 to an l=2 form with the 4 lobes. I was thinking maybe they were basing that on the observation that a linear combination of the wavefunctions of degenerate states are also a solution of the wave equation and were showing that as movement back and forth from p to d orbitals in time. Not at all correct and there would be an l=0 s type component also that I did not see.

On further thought, it might be the 5 orbitals for l=2 in which the third quantum number (usually m) can take values from -2 to 2. The video could just be the 5 morphing into each other. Again, physically meaningless.

The animation is that of the wavefunction. Again - no clue what the point of that is, as you correctly point out that the relevant physical quantity is the probability distribution. (there is also the issue of wtf he's plotting - real or imaginary parts or what, but whatever, minor points over smth that is irrelevant for people like Stu who have no clue about much more fundamental stuff yet)

Atomic orbitals:
http://www.physicscentral.com/buzz/b...87179429249064