I can see the LIGHT!!!! but its bouncing off my eyeballs....

Its a wave, its a particle, no.......its LIGHT!!!!!!!! (or a unicorn if you're Niki)

So if you hadn't guessed it already this post is going to be all about Light! Yay!!!! This week in Chem we did a Spectra lab.  I other words we looked at different light sources (Some of the sources being low pressure tubes filled with a gas like Nitrogen or Helium that had an electric current run through them) through spectrascopes (Cardboard tubes with a special little plastic film on one end, and a tiny slit on the other.....sounds fancier than it really is.)  When you look at the light through the spectrascope the little slit limits the amount that passes through the tube into the the plastic. The plastic splits the light in to the different wavelengths (ROYBGIV).

White light Spectra through Spectrascope

The different light sources emit different wavelengths. When you look at the light through the spectrascope it is possible to determine the element in the light source based on those wave lengths.
In the above picture is a florescent light bulb as viewed through a Spectrascope. Because it emits white light (all wavelengths combined) you can see bands of all the different spectrums present in the picture. Other light sources emit different frequency's of light.  The different frequencies of light are caused by the electrons in the element being at different energy levels.

Energy levels:
-Bohrs Model---------Rather than having electrons located at fixed points in side an atom they are located within different energy levels (called orbitals in Bohrs model)

Bohrs Model

Electrons are located on the blue rings (they are impossible to locate at specific any time) they orbit the nucleus. When you add energy (in the form of electricity) the electrons jump to another level and back to their original level, producing energy in the form of light waves. The black spots are due to the element not being able to make those specific electron jumps. Today rather than orbitals electrons in a particle model are thought to be in electron clouds.

Cloud Model

In the cloud model the 1s, 2s, 2p, and 3s orbitals are the different energy levels. In the cloud model Electrons exist in probability densities which take on certain shapes, not orbitals.



The only problem with Bohrs model is that the math only worked for Hydrogen. Because of this people began to think that electron were waves. In other words, each electron also has a wave, (Thanks a lot to Louis Victor de Broglie) which can be calculated by the equation below, where h is the Planck Constant, and p is the momentum:

Bohr's Caption

With this formula you can calculate the wavelength of anything, therefor everything has/is a wave. Now your every day objects like a car have such a small wave length (thanks to that equation) that it is not noticeable (more like an object, less like a wave). But when you get down to the amazingly small objects like an electron the wavelengths become bigger, and noticeable (thanks again to that equation).

The Wave Model

So.......In conclusion the wave model is pretty far out there in left field for me (mostly because it a pretty new concept) but, I'm hoping that if I Google stuff repetitively,  and ask questions that I should grasp it before the final...hopefully.