When I Was Young.....

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Electron orbitals are indeed volumes of probability where the electron might be at any given moment in time but the shape really has more to do with the electrons repelling each other because of their negative charges. For all intents and purposes an electron can be thought of as occupying the entire volume of its orbital--the volume of the orbital is so small and the electron is moving so quickly that it might as well be everywhere at the same time (even though that isn't really true...but it is close).

In reality, any given electron orbital can extend all the way to the nucleus but--now this gets weird--if the electron gets too close to the nucleus it starts to repel itself because of its own electrical charge. It is moving so quickly and occupies the entire volume of the orbital so that the electron, considered as a particle, can "see" a negative charge on the other side of the nucleus opposite itself and that negative charge repels the particle. The fact that the negative charge it is seeing is its own just shows how strange physics can be at the quantum level.

Space inside an orbital is the same as space outside the orbital; there is no difference.

[Vraith]

Do I remember that electron orbitals were different shapes [dumb-bell rings a bell [no pun intended]] and again IIRC, the shape was in someway related to the probability that the electron would be found somewhere within it's boundary.

If this is correct, what then is the nature of space within this envelope of probability? does the electron effectively occupy the whole shape to the exclusion of space within the orbital - or is there a sort of space-orbital mix - or again can the electron still be considered as a virtual point of mass within an envelope of orbit shaped space?

You may well be correct...but some loose memory detritus prompts me to think that any SINGLE electron has layers of fuzzily spherical cloud possibilities, depending on energy. BUT---two electrons with identical properties cannot overlap terrain...so if there is more than one electron, the whole picture will have lobes/shapes that are not spherical, your dumbell being one of them.

On the second---the "raw" nature of the space itself is the same. But the presence of particles/forces/fields, I think, alters what can happen within that space. I could be completely wrong about that...but I think I've run across such a statement. And it seems to make sense---different possibilities exist in an empty bucket than one full of water or mercury or sand, even though all of them are still buckets of mostly empty space. Different things [or at least a difference in probabilities between particular items/events from among the same total menu of possible things] near the galactic super-hole and intergalactic emptiness. [[[although maybe the difference is all in what happens immediately AFTER some virtual thing pops in???]]]

[peter]

I'll throw in a guess (in respect of the electrons self repelling properties close to the nucleus) that possibly the electrons velocity in covering the smaller end of the orbital might actually be impinging on the quantum level of time - ie if in getting from position a to position b it were actually doing it in as short a time duration as the 'time packets' of quantum time would allow, then this effect might be observed. Mmmm........ maybe not; doesn't sound so credible now it's written down.

I like the bucket analogy V: it does however make me wonder how it can be that the nature of space can be thought to remain the same if the properties of what an occur in it are altered - though on reflection if I think of it in terms of shoes it makes more sense: ballet can say only occur in ballet shoes and road digging in hobnail boots, but fundamentally they both remain shoes (modelled, some might say on an archetypal 'platonic' shoe form ).