Talk:Orbital motion

Merger proposal

There is very little content here, and clear overlap with the "Orbit" article. Djr32 (talk) 18:32, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Before this is merged, I would like to note that, in chemistry, "Orbits" and "Orbitals" are not, in fact, the same. Orbits are from Bohr's model of the atom, and are just circles where the electrons move in a circular motion around the nucleus, whereas orbitals are 3d spaces in which the electrons of an atom move about in 3d space, less like planets around the sun and more like flies trapped in a box. It might be good to be careful which article(s) this information will be moved into. G man yo (talk) 13:02, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

I agree with you about the distinction between orbits and orbitals. There are already good articles on the Bohr model, Atomic orbitals and Molecular orbitals. The Orbit article is very heavily focussed on celestial mechanics - what I think is missing from that article is a few sentences pointing out that the concept can be generalised to other types of motion, that this found application in the Bohr model in early quantum mechanics, but that more accurate QM treatments use the concept of orbitals not orbits. I think that information would be better in the Orbit article, not in a separate Orbital motion article. Unfortunately, I suspect that making this change to the orbit article might be controversial! Will think some more about this... Djr32 (talk) 11:22, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

After rethinking, I would not merge them. In my opinion, there is clear added value in the Orbital motion article, which would be lost in a merge. The only problem is, it looks like more a disambiguation or a dictionary page rather than an encyclopaedic page. Maybe adding some references to what the referenced things have in common would suffice to reduce the problem.--Pot (talk) 07:48, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Then how about changing the style of this page to that of a disambiguation page, and classify it accordingly? 206.53.193.48 (talk) 20:19, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Given the lack of content or topic distinction, a merge is appropriate. I'll do it unless someone objects. Dicklyon (talk) 17:30, 17 September 2009 (UTC)