How Electron Transitions and Orbital Shapes Relate to Light Emission

There's a crazy thing about light that they do not teach you.

The way that quantum mechanics talks about the production of atomic line spectra is that it is always the electron transition.

So the electron goes into some higher energy state, hangs out there for a little bit, then it spontaneously emits.

What they do not mention is that there's actually a physical correlate to that electron transition, which is that in general, in most cases, for light to be produced, the atom has to be excited into a shape that is different from its ground state.

So if you have your spherical toroidal hydrogen in its ground state, you can't just shove it into a larger spherical shape and then have that collapse back down and produce the, the kind of light that we're talking about.

It has to go into like that donut of the P orbital or the clover of the D orbital, and then when it relaxes from those, it can produce light