- #1
flatmaster
- 501
- 2
As a kid, I remember my father saying "there's a small chance that an electron in your body is on the moon" Well, today I decided to calculate the odds. Among the assumptions I made to make math easier.
*Ground state wave function of Hydrogen
*the moon is a cube of sides 2r. where r is the radius of the moon.
*Ignore gravity
Setting the origin at earth, you simply integrate over the volume of the moon in spherical coordinates.
I don't have the result on me now, so I'm guessing at what I got. I think I eliminated some pi's and constants because it's an order of magnitude kind of situation.
{ (rm^2)e^(-ro/ao) } / (ro^2)
rm - radius of the moon
ro - radius of the moon's orbit
ao - bohr radius
My question, the term e^(-ro/ao) is an exponential of a huge negative number. The grapher on this mac makes things look pretty, but it can't crunch numbers. How would you evaluate this?
*Ground state wave function of Hydrogen
*the moon is a cube of sides 2r. where r is the radius of the moon.
*Ignore gravity
Setting the origin at earth, you simply integrate over the volume of the moon in spherical coordinates.
I don't have the result on me now, so I'm guessing at what I got. I think I eliminated some pi's and constants because it's an order of magnitude kind of situation.
{ (rm^2)e^(-ro/ao) } / (ro^2)
rm - radius of the moon
ro - radius of the moon's orbit
ao - bohr radius
My question, the term e^(-ro/ao) is an exponential of a huge negative number. The grapher on this mac makes things look pretty, but it can't crunch numbers. How would you evaluate this?