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Niels Bohr’s First 1913 Paper: Still Relevant, Still Exciting, Still Puzzling

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Kenneth W. Ford; Niels Bohr’s First 1913 Paper: Still Relevant, Still Exciting, Still Puzzling. Phys. Teach. 1 November 2018; 56 (8): 500–502. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.5064553

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Many teachers like to introduce the Bohr atom toward the end of an introductory physics course. This is an excellent idea, given the historic importance of Bohr’s 1913 work, which provided the bridge from Planck’s quantized interaction of matter and radiation (1900) to the full theory of quantum mechanics (1925-28). Unfortunately, the version of the Bohr atom that appears in many textbooks and is no doubt often presented to students is more wrong than right and may leave both teachers and students wondering why, more than a hundred years later, it is still being taught. This “pedagogic” version postulates that an electron in a stationary state moves in a circular orbit with an angular momentum that is an integral multiple of h /2π ( L = nh /2π = nħ )— ħ for the lowest-energy state, 2 ħ for the next state, and so on. This picture of the hydrogen atom is wrong in two senses. First it doesn’t conform to our present understanding of the hydrogen atom. This, in itself, is not a reason to scrap it, for the historical development of quantum physics is certainly of interest. But second, it doesn’t conform to the essence of what Bohr actually did. That is a reason not to teach about circular orbits and L = nħ .

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Bohr's Atomic Model

• First Online: 25 July 2009

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• Arne Schirrmacher  

The model of Niels Bohr (1885–1962) for the atom is since long just the one and only conception for atoms of the vast majority of educated people. The picture of ► electrons revolving round a nucleus on select avenues has become the icon of the atomic age. In stark contrast to this omnipresence, historically, the Bohr atom may be identified as the best available theory for the atom only for a period of roughly ten years between 1914 and 1924. For this reason any consideration of Bohr's atom has to take into account both the historical context of its creation and the long and diverse processes of reception within science, education and public that gave rise to much misinterpretation of Bohr's intentions, his actual work and its physical or realistic interpretation.

For the question of the genesis of the Bohr model one has to go back to the beginning of the twentieth century, when it became widely recognized that both atoms contain electrons and at the same time were almost fully penetrable by electron bombardment. Between 1901 and 1905 various physicists and science popularizers draw the analogy between atoms and planetary systems (e.g. Jean Perrin (1870–1942), Wilhelm Meyer (1853–1910), or Hantaro Nagaoka (1856–1950) ► atomic models) and some of them immediately realized the difference: Since electric forces were both attractive and repulsive it was hard to understand how stable configurations could result at all. As a consequence in the years before world war I concern with detailed atomic models was not widespread. For this reason also the ► Rutherford atom was largely ignored until it could be reinterpreted as a predecessor of the Bohr atom. The favorite heuristic models for the atom in the years around 1910 also for Bohr was Thomson's that came in various imprecise and at times conflicting variations but was nonetheless able to serve in this way the purpose in helping to conceptualize stability, light emission and the existence of a periodic system of elements.

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Bohr’s Trilogy of 1913

Primary Literature

Niels Bohr: Collected Works , 12 vols. (Amsterdam 1972–2007; contains in Volumes 2 and 4 in particular the 1912 “Rutherford Memorandum” and the 1913 Bohr “trilogy” On the constitution of atoms and molecules I–III, from Philosophical Magazine, as well as the letters)

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Arnold Sommerfeld: Atombau und Spektrallinien (Braunschweig 1919)

Hendrik A. Kramers, Helge Holst: The atom and the Bohr theory of its structure (Copenhagen 1923)

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Gerhard Zoubek, Bernhard Lauth: Zur Rekonstruktion des Bohrschen Forschungsprogramms I & II. Erkenntnis 37 (2), 223–247, 249–273 (1992)

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Schirrmacher, A. (2009). Bohr's Atomic Model. In: Greenberger, D., Hentschel, K., Weinert, F. (eds) Compendium of Quantum Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70626-7_18

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Atomic physics seeks to understand and control the quantum behavior of matter at the smallest scale. What are the fundamental properties of single atoms, ions, molecules, and photons? Once we combine them together, what are the laws governing emergent many-body phenomena such as superfluidity and magnetism? Can we create and study new states of matter that have never existed in nature before? And how can we exert control over quantum properties to engineer useful systems such as precise clocks, new sensors, fundamentally improved measurements, and new paradigms of quantum computation?

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atomic theory , ancient philosophical speculation that all things can be accounted for by innumerable combinations of hard, small, indivisible particles (called atoms ) of various sizes but of the same basic material; or the modern scientific theory of matter according to which the chemical elements that combine to form the great variety of substances consist themselves of aggregations of similar subunits (atoms) possessing nuclear and electron substructure characteristic of each element. The ancient atomic theory was proposed in the 5th century bce by the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus and was revived in the 1st century bce by the Roman philosopher and poet Lucretius . The modern atomic theory, which has undergone continuous refinement, began to flourish at the beginning of the 19th century with the work of the English chemist John Dalton . The experiments of the British physicist Ernest Rutherford in the early 20th century on the scattering of alpha particles from a thin gold foil established the Rutherford atomic model of an atom as consisting of a central, positively charged nucleus containing nearly all the mass and surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged planetlike electrons .

With the advent of quantum mechanics and the Schrödinger equation in the 1920s, atomic theory became a precise mathematical science . Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised a partial differential equation for the quantum dynamics of atomic electrons, including the electrostatic repulsion of all the negatively charged electrons from each other and their attraction to the positively charged nucleus. The equation can be solved exactly for an atom containing only a single electron ( hydrogen ), and very close approximations can be found for atoms containing two or three electrons ( helium and lithium , respectively). To the extent that the Schrödinger equation can be solved for more-complex cases, atomic theory is capable of predicting from first principles the properties of all atoms and their interactions. The recent availability of high-speed supercomputers to solve the Schrödinger equation has made possible accurate calculations of properties for atoms and molecules with ever larger numbers of electrons. Precise agreement with experiment is obtained if small corrections due to the effects of the theory of special relativity and quantum electrodynamics are also included.

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