Quantum Physics: Fact or Fiction? (2): Atoms and Physical Waves

* Disclaimer: In this series, we publish a summary of the most important chapters of the book (Quantum Physics: Fact or Fiction?!) by Dr. Alistair Ray, former professor of physics at the University of Birmingham. Atoms and Physical Waves Just as the wave model of light has settled in classical physics, so too, at the turn of the 20th century, it almost certainly settled that the material is composed of extremely small particles, or atoms. Dalton's atomic theory has clearly succeeded in explaining chemical processes, and it turns out that the phenomenon of "Brownian Motion" (in which smoke particles in the air undergo irregular fluctuations) is also explained by random collisions between air molecules. As early as the 20th century, Ernest Rutherford demonstrated that an atom's electron structure is progressively entangled with a tiny nucleus charged with a positive electrical charge, in which most of the mass of the atom is concentrated, and predicted that the atom is composed of these positive nuclei surrounded by those electrons. All attempts of classical physics failed to describe the structure of the atom in a more detailed form. Shortly before World War I, Niels Bohr (and will be much more frequently named from now on) devised a model to explain the structure of a hydrogen atom (containing a single electron). The electron orbit in this model remains stable under certain conditions. This model was remarkably successful, but failed to explain the properties of atoms containing more than one electron, and did not find the reason for the stable orbits of these electrons.[citation needed] Almost a decade later in the early 1920s, the French physicist Louis de Broglie put forward a revolutionary hypothesis: if light waves sometimes behaved like particles; Is it possible, then, that microparticles such as electrons and nuclei of atoms sometimes behave like waves? Perhaps we are thinking of conducting a double-slit experiment using a beam of electrons to validate this strange idea (as in Figure 112). At the time, this was not feasible in practice; Because, according to De Bruye's calculations, the wavelength of the electron beam was so short that the edges of the interference pattern were so close together that they could not be discerned. But De Bruye's idea was confirmed by another similar experiment, in which electrons deviated after passing through a nickel crystal. In that experiment, he observed a pattern of varying intensity, and explained that some interference occurred between the waves of electrons that deviated after passing through the levels of different atoms in the crystal, confirming that the beam of electrons actually behaved like waves in this situation. Recently, it has become possible to generate a beam of electrons with a wavelength sufficient to show the pattern of interference in the double-slit experiment. Further experiments were then conducted using neutrons, atoms, molecules and other particles, all of which were confirmed to have the same wave characteristics. The hypothesis of the wave nature of particles has also been indirectly confirmed (though more dramatically) by their ability to explain the electronic structure of atoms. The full explanation of this point is beyond the scope of our book because it requires complex mathematical analysis. Combining the physical wave hypothesis with the force of attraction between the negatively charged electrons and the positively charged nucleus, which is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, produces an equation with multiple solutions, which determines the shape of the electron waves in this position. The solutions of this equation (known as the "Schrodinger equation", relative to the "Erwin Schr?dinger" limit). We have previously seen that the photon energy is proportional to the wavelength of the beam of light it forms; hence the conclusion that the light emitted by the excited atoms will have specific wavelengths. It was already known that the light emitted by the atoms (e.g. in vacuum tubes) was determined by that characteristic, and the great triumph of the cause equation was only that. (*) The term "supplemented values" means that they are discrete fractional values, such as integers. If we say, for example, that the energy levels of an electron are a supple; it is not possible that the energy of an electron is a number between these values. (translator) — Source: Published on Facebook's "Braheen Center" page