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...

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