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by mr_mitm
1525 days ago
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The first real head scratchers were the black body spectrum [0] and the fact that atoms are stable. Rutherford [1] showed that atoms consist of a tiny, positively charged nucleus and rather large negatively charged shell. It was hypothesized that electrons are flying around the nucleus like planets around the sun. But we already knew at that point that moving charges emit radiation, which causes the electron to lose energy and move closer to the nucleus. So it should pretty much immediately collapse into a point. Bohr then showed that if you assume that only certain orbits were allowed, it works out pretty nicely. Nowadays we now that there is such a thing as a ground state, meaning the lowest amount of energy the electron can possibly have around a nucleus is enough to keep it moving. The idea for quantizing things came from observing the black body spectrum. If you sum up all contributions classically, you get infinity. Planck tried to see what happens if you assume that energy comes in little packets instead of a continuous spectrum. He didn't have any justification for it, but it matched the observations pretty well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutherford_model |
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