This is a continuation of the previous post but can be enjoyed independently.
Science and religion both arise from human minds seeking to find mental interpretations of the Word as the creation of superhuman mind. Quantum Mechanics QM as the mechanics of atoms and molecules came out from a perceived shortcoming of classical Newtonian physics in the late 19th century, so immensely successful in describing the macroscopic world, to capture the microscopic world of atoms and molecules.
The German physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1926 took the first step out of a deadlock into the modern physics of QM by formulating a mathematical model of the Hydrogen atom with one electron surrounding a proton kernel in the form of an eigenvalue problem for a partial differential equation for a negative charge density subject to Coulomb attraction from a positive kernel.
The success was complete since the eigenvalues precisely agreed with the observed spectrum of excited states of the Hydrogen atom with corresponding eigenfunctions as wave functions representing vibrational spatial modes of the electron taking the following form:
to be compared with those of e g a circular membrane
The complete success of the Schrödinger equation capturing the spectrum of the Hydrogen atom with one electron demanded generalisation to atoms with more than one electron, which was accomplished by formally adding a new set of 3d coordinates for each electron into a linear Schrödinger equation (S) in $3N$ spatial dimensions for an atom/molecule with $N>1$ electrons like a Gold atom with 79 electrons in $237$ spatial dimensions, as a partial differential equation of a completely new form with solutions named wave functions for which the physics had to be invented as probabilities of electron configurations.
- Describe ground state electron configurations of atoms/molecules with $N>1$ as linear combinations of excited states of the one electron of the Hydrogen atom.
- describing a complex system as a copy of a simple component building the system
- preformatism of the 17th century as a tiny human ("homunculus") inside the egg of a female.
- symmetric and antisymmetric wave functions as bosons and fermions
- electrons with spin-up and spin-down
- paired and unpaired electrons
- Hund's rule, Madelung rule, octet rule
- s, p, d, f states in atoms
- quarks, leptons, gluons, weak force, strong force...
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