"Does God play dice with the Universe?" The natural width of excited hydrogen atoms are found using the Bohr's model of this atom and de Broglie's ideas. The mean life time of the excited states is a characteristic only of a statistical ensemble of many atoms.
The Bohr model is historically important in the understanding of quantum physics. It gives many important results for the hydrogen atom including atomic size and ionization energy. It is sometimes referred to as a semi-classical calculation, because it includes the physics of angular momentum quantization without the full quantum mechanical description of an electron wave. It is tremendously useful for gaining physical intuition of the quantum nature of the atom. In the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom, an electron has a circular orbit with speed v and radius r about the proton. The Bohr quantization condition is that an integer number of electron (de Broglie) wavelengths must fit to the atomic circumference.
In 1913, Niels Bohr developed an accurate model for the hydrogen atom. The mathematics involved and the simplicity of this model is easily understood. The intention of the paper is not to replace Bohr's model, but to find a similar model for all atoms. The model discussed, which was developed on the same basis as Bohr's model for the hydrogen atom, calculates the radii and the energies of the orbits. The wavelength of an emitted photon when an electron makes a ‘jump’ from a higher state to a lower state can also be calculated from the model. Finally, the paper demonstrates that the model obeys the de Broglie's hypothesis that the moving electron exhibits both wave and particle properties.
The whole realm of phenomena at the atomic or subatomic level is the special province of quantum theory. When isolated from radiation and other atoms, most atoms remain stable indefinitely: they neither collapse nor explode. When atoms are excited electrically or by collisions or otherwise, they emit radiation of discrete wavelengths characteristic of the kind of atoms excited. The simplest model of the atom is a hard, tiny, electrically neutral sphere—just the smallest possible fragment of the bulk material that possesses the identity of a given chemical element. Neils Bohr's theory was built primarily on the photon concept of radiation, which was understood as an hypothesis but was not yet unambiguously verified when Bohr did his early work. Bohr's first solution of the hydrogen-atom problem in his historic 1913 paper depended on a rather arbitrary combination of classical and quantum ideas.
Bohr’s model of the hydrogen atom was successful in that it gave us a radically new way to look at atoms. However, it has serious shortcomings. It could not be used to explain the spectra of He or any multielectron atom. It could not predict the intensities of the H absorption and emission lines. With de Broglie’s hypothesis that matter was also wavelike,1 there arose a question at the 1925 Solvey conference: What is the wave equation? De Broglie could not answer this; however, over the next year Erwin Schro¨dinger, working in Vienna, published a series of papers in which he deduced the general form of the equation that bears his name and applied it successfully to the hydrogen atom.2,3 What emerged was a new set of postulates, much like Newton’s, that laid the foundations of quantum theory.
This chapter has provided an alternate method of solving simple problems in atomic physics under Bohr’s model to aid good mental picture of hydrogen atom to scientists. Two values of fundamental physical properties of an electron in the hydrogen atom has been identified. By limiting the orbiting electrons to a series of circular orbits having discrete radii, Bohr could account for the series of discrete wavelengths in the emission spectrum of hydrogen. Light, he proposed, radiated from hydrogen atoms only when an electron made a transition from an outer orbit to one closer to the nucleus. These physical properties (Ve = 174090.938ms-1& Pe = 1.585860888 × 10-25kgms-1) are constant in nature. The aim for the review was to contribute to the solution of disagreement between the Bohr’s wavelength (λ0 = 91.12nm) and the Balmer’s experimental observation (λ0 = 91.18nm) for the emission spectrum of hydrogen atom. There are two other constants δ = 7.199822 × 10-10 eVm and ζ = 1503796277m-1 that were identified in the Bohr’s equation of the hydrogen atom. The four fundamental physical constants can be applied to multi-electron systems because they are inherent characteristics of an electron. They can also be derived from the steady state hydrogen atom Schrodinger's equation. For a deeper understanding, these constants may be scrutinised for their determination. The study recommends that current quantum atomic models and equations governing quantum physics should be revisited for better applications and understanding of the physical world.