files.wordpres…it shows were electron density is the greatest (the brighter the higher the electron density) and where electrons cannot be. (the black areas).now look at this sitehttp://glafreniere.com/sa_spherical.htmit attempts to show standing spherical waves.......
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the concept of an electron being a discrete particle orbiting a nucleus is obsolete. It's used as a teaching tool to introduce students to the concept of electrons. But in reality, the space where the electron resides is more like a smear with different densities.
take a look at this pic
http://mrsdarlingswebpage.files.wordpres…
it shows were electron density is the greatest (the brighter the higher the electron density) and where electrons cannot be. (the black areas).
now look at this site
http://glafreniere.com/sa_spherical.htm
it attempts to show standing spherical waves. Which is what an electron would be.
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for all practical purposes in general chemistry, electrons can be thought of as particles for simplicity. When you get into quantum mechanics, and the associated labs, you start to get into the wave nature of electrons.
Honestly no one really knows, I'm sure they'll be better answers provided by physicists, but essentially all matter can be considered as both a particle and a wave (as described by the wave particle duality equation) the best was to think of electrons for chemistry is as clouds of negative charge. The world of the electron is strange, you may be shocked to find out sometimes they do not even move around the nucleus but just sit still.
Well, some time around the beginning of the 20th century people were just starting to discover atoms and how they behaved, and it became clear pretty soon that the atom itself was made of a core with positive charge and something around it with a negative charge, and that's the electron.
The thing is: The concept of a particle is just an abstraction. It works good enough if you want to describe a billiard ball, but once you start looking closer, you will see that an electron cannot behave the same way as one intuitively would expect from a particle. A lot of the behavior of electron can, however, be explained by treating it as a wave. But only part of it. That's why quantum mechanics is so difficult: There is no simple "everyday life" analog. It's impossible to say "Think of an electron as a ping pong ball" or "Think of an electron as a ... whatever". There's nothing in the "big" world we could compare it to.
One can set up experiments to clearly demonstrate that the electron behaves as a wave (showing interference and diffraction and all these things that light waves do) but one can also set up experiments to clearly demonstrate that the electron is a particle with a mass.
So the "dots" you used to see correspond to the "particle" aspect of electrons and the squiggly lines correspond to the "wave" aspect of electrons.
To finally answer your question: The electron is an elementary particle obeying the laws of quantum mechanics instead of "normal" (classical) mechanics.
