Physicists engineer the picture-perfect classical atom
Tuesday, April 14, 2009 - 05:28
in Physics & Chemistry
Picture the textbook atom. It would resemble a miniature solar system - an atomic nucleus orbited by electrons, drawn in nice tidy elliptical orbits - like planets orbiting the Sun. This is a reasonable classical depiction of an atom, but it is completely at odds with the usual quantum description of an atom...