Stupid people, Stupid Questions

Reminder: This is not LLM generated slop. Pure Ideas. Natural Stupidity. Please care to send your discourse to my whatsapp for those who know me and those who don’t, via the comment section.

We are taught that an atom is a configuration of protons and neutrons orbited by electrons in an equal number and of opposite charge to the proton number, and that reactions will occur to produce molecules that have a complete "outer shell" of electrons which are therefore stable and nonreactive. But how close is this to what's actually going on?

I believe that atomic structure as typically described in chemistry books is not an accurate representation of reality, but rather a heuristic device that allows us to more easily visualize chemical reactions and predict their outcomes. Chemistry books are almost entirely rules of thumb and simplistic models that help summarize huge amounts of experimental trends but have lots of exceptions.

That being said, the underlying physical ideas can be made precise and the rules of thumbs summarize phenomenological details, but usually the systems are so enormously complicated that (even for a multi electron atom) you have to resort to simplifying assumptions to even simulate things from first principles. Experimental verification of chemistry is always very important. Its not about why anymore like we use to say in logic, it is more about how. Understanding how all of that works is the real thing here.

Scientific models always approximate the truth and reality to a certain degree but the model is as accurate insofar as to what it tries to explain and represented a huge advancement in human thought.

For example, An electron. Explain what an electron is, and, specifically Why an electron is. In this case, electron probability clouds are a more accurate description of the nature of "electrons" than viewing them as discrete particles. This wouldn't be useful to delve into in the Bohr model because it achieves it's purpose in a simplified way. I'm talking about simplistic models like the Bohr model, but it applies to modern quantum mechanics too, yeah. scientific ideas are simplistic by their intent. It's OK, some people are just incapable of abstract though, it's a small part of life, and one should not worry about it.

Any person capable of coherently understanding science Understands the incapability that lies with models. ALL of science is "just models". Models are how we describe phenomena we observer. Models work within domains of applicability; if you exceed that domain, your model won't be very good. Mostly people fuck up scheduled classes on the account of trying to be a smart fucker who tries to impress by asking nonsensical questions, but their mid wit brains cannot comprehend the fact that talking out of domain is illogical and unnecessary. Please don’t shit in class. No one is impressed.

Things like Lewis structures and oxidation states, when compared to better models, capture some features of the more fundamental models, but they are also essentially cartoons. it's like how you can immediately recognize a cartoon of a person captures important visual features of a person, but scribbles on paper really bear little resemblance to actual people.

Most of the models are informed not by theory, but by observation. The entire periodic table is unknown on a theoretical basis.

They can't tell you why for shells
bugaboo spherical harmonics

Why these ones and not others?
Why proton counts inform chemical behavior
oogabagunga but we have stated their behavior!

Why geometry changes these things
oogaboogabungabunga, actually no clue

There is no theory tying any of this together. And it gets worse at nano-scale if atomic properties are actually bulk characteristics that alter when counts drop.

If you think that anything Unifying exists in this world; Thank you. To each their own; but please stop shitting in classes which are a way to educate, not waste time on your dumb ideas which are clearly half baked given the fact that you are incoherent in them.