Amazing chemistry.
Atomic orbitals aren’t defined shapes—they’re basically just probability plots of possible electron positions given time and space and energy. The doorknob that is the p-orbital, and the two-eggs-and-a-doughnut that is the dz2 orbital, are all only probabilities. They’re intangible numbers.
And yet, in that intangibility is an actual physical reality. So real, in fact, that the overlap of these probability waves—better known as covalent bonds—are strong. So strong, in fact, that a tetrahedral covalent network of Carbon forms the unscratchably hard diamond. Amazing, isn’t it?
