4D Worldbuilding 2024-10-30
So, I ended up not crunching the numbers on solenoids, but I did crunch the numbers on other things.
First off, I did figure out how to scale up the Stern-Gerlach experiment, but I'm not totally sure what kind of square I expect it to create, just that it is a square.
I then felt comfortable synthesizing a bunch of Stack Exchange answers and Wikipedia articles into a probably-good-enough guess about electron orbitals and nuclear shells. The electron orbitals were independently checked by considering the number of spherical harmonics in 4 dimensions.
At this point, I'm feeling okay just ignoring the question of how the atoms are fitting together (people have tried to answer this elsewhere, but I haven't had the wherewithal to make sense of the answers), and forging ahead with sketching out chemistry. There are some things that I grasp better than others.
- I've been pondering molecular orbitals; initial ideas about sigma orbitals are... confusing.
- Until I grasp all of the ways that sigma orbitals interact, I don't think I have a hope of analyzing the second row.
- Hopefully pi orbitals aren't too much harder.
- I haven't reviewed electronegativity at all, so I'm not really ready to consider stuff like "what happens when a halogen-analogue bonds to anything else?"
Anyway, I let things go late and I don't think I have anything else to say now, so here's to drawing some painfully elaborate diagrams tomorrow.
Good night.