The Atom - Part Three

It was the insight of the century (OPINION!).

By the time the Bohr atom had come along, everyone knew that light behaved like particles AND waves, depending on the experiment.

Prince Louis De Broglie took this concept and turned it on its head, reasoning thus:

"So, the quanta of light, which we know as waves, sometimes behave like particles. WHY CAN'T particles, sometimes behave as waves?"

He even backed this insight up with a formula for the wavelength of a particle:

wavelength = (Planck's constant) divided by (particle momentum)

His PhD thesis was one side of A4 (mine was a mini-book of 10 chapters).

This got the theorists thunking. Then two guys name Davisson and Germer successfully DIFFRACTED a stream of electrons, PROVING that the stream behaved like light.

Then the A-HA came (as Martin Gardner would have said).

If electrons behaved as waves sometimes, if they were in an atom, unless their "orbits" were whole numbers of electron wavelengths, there was no possibility of any other configuration because of destructive interference. Have you ever tried to poing a ruler on the end of a desk any other way than the notes you get?

Yes, resonance was the key. The electron waves resonated around the nucleus exactly like notes in a piano. Only certain frequencies "poinged".

So the picture that emerged was this one:





Ripples in a pond. Rulers poinging. Piano strings vibrating. If you will pardon the pun, does this ring any bells?

WAVES.

The electrons behaved as waves in the atom.

The upshot of this realisation was that Quantum Mechanics was born. (sorry Max)

Enter Erwin Shrodinger......