August 11, 2016 Thursday
Bedtime Story
It was in the year of 1913 at the age of 28, a year after his marriage and return from England that Bohr published 3 landmark papers that famously came to be known as "the trilogy".
In this he applied Max Planck's quantum theory to the Rutherford's nuclear framework.
I hope you understand this was not for fun but to explain the unexplained.
There was still no sensible account for the origin of the spectral lines of elements, specially hydrogen.
(These spectral lines are akin to the fingerprints of human apes).
Before Bohr, planetary models of atoms had been written about.
But Bohr took it a whole new level, pun intended.
Johann Balmer, a Swiss mathematician and a mathematical physicist had derived an empirical formula for the visible spectral lines of the hydrogen atom in 1885.
He in turn had used a formula and a constant that had been derived by the Swedish physicist Johannes Rydberg to predict the wavelengths of photons emitted by electron jumps.
Rydberg in fact had much earlier (late 1800s) anticipated the link between spectral studies and atomic structure.
Rydberg constant R infinity is one of the most accurately measured physical constants in physics.
It can be a topic of a series of summer lectures if one cared to understand it in depth.
I hope you are getting the idea that Bohr had constructed a new model of atom based on lesser studied papers by little known physicists to explain certain features of atoms and elements which the existing model then was not failing to address.
Many older physicists like Thomson, Rayleigh and Hendrick Lorentz did not find the trilogy to their liking.
But the next gen of scientists namely Rutherford, David Hilbert, good old Unca Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Max Born and Arnold Sommerfeld perceived this as a major breakthrough.
By the way, Arnold Sommerfeld is the German theoretical physicist who introduced the 2nd quantum number (azimuthal) and the 4th quantum number (spin) and who too needs to be attended by me in future.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
Bedtime Story
It was in the year of 1913 at the age of 28, a year after his marriage and return from England that Bohr published 3 landmark papers that famously came to be known as "the trilogy".
In this he applied Max Planck's quantum theory to the Rutherford's nuclear framework.
I hope you understand this was not for fun but to explain the unexplained.
There was still no sensible account for the origin of the spectral lines of elements, specially hydrogen.
(These spectral lines are akin to the fingerprints of human apes).
Before Bohr, planetary models of atoms had been written about.
But Bohr took it a whole new level, pun intended.
Johann Balmer, a Swiss mathematician and a mathematical physicist had derived an empirical formula for the visible spectral lines of the hydrogen atom in 1885.
He in turn had used a formula and a constant that had been derived by the Swedish physicist Johannes Rydberg to predict the wavelengths of photons emitted by electron jumps.
Rydberg in fact had much earlier (late 1800s) anticipated the link between spectral studies and atomic structure.
Rydberg constant R infinity is one of the most accurately measured physical constants in physics.
It can be a topic of a series of summer lectures if one cared to understand it in depth.
I hope you are getting the idea that Bohr had constructed a new model of atom based on lesser studied papers by little known physicists to explain certain features of atoms and elements which the existing model then was not failing to address.
Many older physicists like Thomson, Rayleigh and Hendrick Lorentz did not find the trilogy to their liking.
But the next gen of scientists namely Rutherford, David Hilbert, good old Unca Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Max Born and Arnold Sommerfeld perceived this as a major breakthrough.
By the way, Arnold Sommerfeld is the German theoretical physicist who introduced the 2nd quantum number (azimuthal) and the 4th quantum number (spin) and who too needs to be attended by me in future.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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