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The Structure of Atoms

J. S. Marshall, E. R. Pounder, Robert William Stewart

Published Jan 1, 1967• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

So far, this book has dealt almost exclusively with classical physics, which is a theoretical structure based on many brilliant and imaginative experiments performed on macroscopic objects, that is on objects of about our size or a few orders of magnitude smaller or larger. Classical physics was found to give good results when extrapolated downward to molecules and upward to planets, stars, and galaxies, and it was seriously suggested ate in the nineteenth century that all the major discoveries in physics had been made — that the physical basis of the universe was understood and that only minor tidying-up remained.

DOI
10.1007/978-1-349-81613-2_41

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So far, this book has dealt almost exclusively with classical physics, which is a theoretical structure based on many brilliant and imaginative experiments performed on macroscopic objects, that is on objects of about our size or a few orders of magnitude smaller or larger. Classical physics was found to give good results when extrapolated downward to molecules and upward to planets, stars, and galaxies, and it was seriously suggested ate in the nineteenth century that all the major discoveries in physics had been made — that the physical basis of the universe was understood and that only minor tidying-up remained.
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Science has developed through a variety of investigations more or less over the time scale of human existence. On this scale, quantum mechanics is an extremely young field, existing essentially for only just over a century. Even our understanding of classical mechanics has existed for a comparatively long period—roughly having been formalized with Newton's equations published in his Principia Mathematica , in April 1686 (1687). Up until the very end of the nineteenth century, mechanics in the form of Newton's laws were comfortable, being understood and accepted by all who dealt with the motion of reasonable bodies. With the turn of the new century, however, mechanics would be shaken to its roots. The change began already on December 14, 1900, when Planck (1900) presented his new theory of black-body radiation to the German Physical Society, and this change would affect mechanics in physically small structures (and lead to quantum mechanics). Mechanics of large bodies would similarly be changed in 1905 with the arrival of Albert Einstein's (1905a) relativity theory. In this book, we will deal with only the first of these two great breakthroughs.
Abstract As the end of the nineteenth century, the search for Nature’s basic laws seemed close to its goal. There was a sense of a task accomplished. Physics presented an orderly scene that fit the proper Victorian mood of the day. Objects both on Earth and in the heavens behaved in accord with Newton’s laws. So, presumably, did atoms. The nature of atoms was unclear. But to most scientists the rest of the job of describing the universe seemed a filling in of the details of the Great Machine.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, it became clear that some experiments cannot be explained on the basis of known physics, now referred to as classical physics. In 1900, Max Planck was able to correctly describe the distribution of blackbody radiation energy as a function of wavelength λ or frequency ν = c/λ. He had to accept the existence of energy packets (quanta) with energy E = hν. A few years later, Albert Einstein found that this unexpected relation between energy and frequency is also necessary in order to understand photoemission from metallic surfaces. A decade later, Niels Bohr arrived at the correct equation for the electronic spectrum of the hydrogen atom by applying “quantum conditions” on the motion of the electron around the nucleus and the Planck’s relation E = hν on the energy difference between the energy levels (1916). A decade later, Heisenberg, Born, and Jordan introduced “quantum mechanics” and de Broglie and Schrödinger (1925-1926) introduced “wave mechanics.”