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I guess the more interesting question is why this doesn't happen for neighbouring elements in the periodic table?

Meanwhile there are quarks inside every regular atom moving at speeds like 0.99995c ...

This is the coolest fact I’ve learned in a long time. Thank you!

Sigma and Pi bonds are typically covered in AP Chemistry, even if the “why/how” is hand waved pretty heavily. The valence cloud shapes get wild for heavier atoms and bonds between two or more atoms add even more to the mix.

Could electrons orbit a neutron star if we gave it a positive charge?

As written that sentence is wrong. The increased nuclear mass is not the cause of the effects. It's the increase in the nuclear charge and subsequent modification of the coulomb potential that is relevant.

Seems to be the first time this was confirmed via direct experimental observation of the orbitals:

  “This idea that relativity is important in heavy elements has been around since the 1970s,” said Lai-Sheng Wang, a professor of chemistry at Brown and the study’s corresponding author. “But we show direct spectroscopic evidence that what we learned in high school about chemical bonding isn’t true in heavy elements."

In general, yes. Spin-orbit coupling and relativistic effects in heavier elements is not new. A rather... significant elements where this was studied was uranium (and plutonium, of course). Even napkin maths show that for heavy elements, some of the electrons have relativistic velocities.

This discovery is about a (seemingly, I haven't been keeping up too much) new case of one specific bond in one specific ion. Do not read the university's breathless press release, go straight to the article. The third sentence of the editor's summary is "It’s long been clear that this model starts to fray when the atoms get heavy enough for relativity to come into play".

Yes, I was taught that relativity is a significant part of quantum chemistry equations in gold atoms 25 years ago. The idea is quite old and the title is misleading.

The article seems to be more specific, about relativistic effects in triple bonds

The Dirac equation which is the equation for describing the wavelike behavior of electrons. It predicted the existence of antimatter and particle spin.

You start with the Schrödinger equation, add relativity to get the Klein-Gordon equation which is a mess because it's second order in time involving negative probabilities, if you in ways "take the square root" of it you get the Dirac equation.

Relativity has been part of the understanding of electrons since 1928.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation

There's even a Wikipedia page for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_quantum_chemistry

Yes: the article says "since the 70s"

Gold electrons at inner orbits travel at a large fraction of the speed of light, which is why gold isn't a silver color. That is really neat.

I don’t get it, someone explain? Doesn’t everything get color from relativistic effects?

His brilliance transcends science, e.g:

<https://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s6681.pdf>

He was a very proud Jew, who questioned whether he would have been had he not been born into such life. I disagree immensely with him on his pure-fatalism POV, but obviously everybody reading this knows his last name more than anyelse's [& definitely not mine].

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I have a degree in medicinal chemistry, back from the ancient mid-00s (pre Youtube) and just cannot imagine how incredible science education is/could_be with all the modern visual aids [†]. That models for every single element are just a click away and highly interactive, within any online web_browser (and without additional softwares).

Old is new again. Thanks Einstein. I cannot even begin to imagine just how far ahead his own brain was processing this complexity.

[†] Back then I was still doing organic chemistry rotations entirely within my own spatial cortex, because the only visuals were 2D prints in the library. Somehow earned 'A's {thanks brain}.

His name will still go way down in history, that is assured

Bismuth can also be used as a collector metal for smelting precious metals instead of lead. It even cupells the same way as lead.

Bohmian mechanics is nonrelativistic, so it has been "falsified" since its inception. It generally makes identical predictions to nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (i.e. the Schrödinger equation), but finding a relativistic version, equivalent to the Dirac equation in QM, has been difficult due to the nonlocality of the pilot wave.

They’re already taxed to fund pure research, it would be unfair to charge royalties for non-rivalrous products they can’t monetise.

> things could be true and false at the same time at other scale.

Being true and false at the same time is a contradiction. But yeah, there is such a thing as mathematical intuitionism that rejects the law of excluded middle (which is not "being true and false at the same time"). It's just one philosophical stance among others though.

P ^ not P => _|_

The axioms of a logic that are consistent will definitely not let a statement be true and false at the same time.