Guest author, Thomas Kennedy, features a twice-monthly series, Quantum Leap, wherein he guides readers through the fascinating world of quantum mechanics. This is issue 011.
==========================================================
(Continued from issue 010 – Charge!)
But there appeared something terribly wrong with Rutherford’s model of the atom. The theory of electricity and magnetism predicted that opposite charges attract each other and the electrons should gradually lose energy and spiral inward. Moreover, physicists reasoned that the atoms should give off a rainbow of colors as they do so. But no experiment could verify this rainbow.
In 1912 a Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, came up with a theory that said the electrons do not spiral into the nucleus and came up with some rules for what does happen. (This began a new approach to science because, for the first time, rules had to fit the observation regardless of how they conflicted with the theories of the time.)
