Ever since the Big Bang, the electrons inside every atom have been revolving their orbits
for 15 billion years, yet never colliding with each other.
Who maintains such an order within such a small realm?
Yeah, so when we think about the electrons going around the atoms, this is actually one
of the things that historically persuaded people that quantum mechanics was true.
Because if you think of the electron as just this little billiard ball orbiting around the
nucleus, sort of like the way the Earth orbits around the sun, the problem with that is as
the electron moves, it would be radiating energy away, and eventually it would lose all of
its energy, and it would fall into the nucleus and crash.
So just if we have a satellite around the Earth, none of them stay up there forever.
They all eventually run out of energy and fall down and burn up in the atmosphere.
So there was a big question in people's minds, why doesn't that happen with the electrons orbiting
the atoms?
And the answer turns out to be quantum mechanics, that the lowest resonance of the electron around
the atom has a certain wavelength, and it corresponds to a certain distance of the electron away
from the nucleus.
And it simply can't go any lower.
So in sort of a musical analogy, you could say, if I'm playing a musical instrument, there
is one lowest note that I can play on that musical instrument, and I can't go any lower.
And we would call that the fundamental resonance, and something very much like that with the
electrons around the atoms.
So you could say that the system of quantum mechanics keeping the electrons stable is really
another place where God intervenes to make the laws of physics work so that things allow
us to exist and so on.
If it was a purely classical world, then actually we couldn't exist because the electrons would
just fall into the nuclei.
And again, when we talk about fine tuning parameters, one of the parameters that is extraordinarily
important is Heisenberg's, or sorry, the Planck constant, which determines the length scale
over which that quantum mechanics applies.
And if that was too large, then we would have really weird quantum mechanical effects, and
if it was too small, then other bad things would happen.
And so quantum mechanics actually is another example of a fine tuned theory that allows things
to be stable.