By jumping from one orbit to another, the atom could receive or emit radiation at specific energies, reflecting their quantum nature. Bohr put the electrons into orbits around the nucleus, like planets in a subatomic solar system, except they could only have certain predefined orbital distances. By this point, it was known that an atom was made of a heavy, dense, positively charged nucleus surrounded by a swarm of tiny, light, negatively charged electrons. In the 1910s, Danish physicist Niels Bohr tried to describe the internal structure of atoms using quantum mechanics. How does quantum mechanics describe atoms? In 1924, French physicist Louis de Broglie used the equations of Einstein's theory of special relativity to show that particles can exhibit wave-like characteristics and that waves can exhibit particle-like characteristics - a finding for which he won the Nobel Prize a few years later. Even when a single electron is shot through the slits at a time, the interference pattern shows up - an effect akin to a single electron interfering with itself. This pattern of dark and bright bands makes sense only if the electrons are waves, with crests (high points) and troughs (low points), that can interfere with one another. Instead, when the experiment is conducted, an interference pattern forms on the screen. If the electrons were particles, they would create two bright lines where they had impacted the screen after passing through one or the other of the slits, according to a popular article in Nature. This can be most famously seen in the double-slit experiment, where particles such as electrons are shot at a board with two slits cut into it, behind which sits a screen that lights up when an electron hits it. In quantum mechanics, particles can sometimes exist as waves and sometimes exist as particles. Here is a diagram of the double-slit experiment where electrons produce a wave pattern when two slits are used. It also explained how certain colors of light could eject electrons off metal surfaces - a phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect. With this new way to conceive of light, Einstein offered insights into the behavior of nine phenomena in his paper, including the specific colors that Planck described being emitted from a light bulb filament. This is where the "quantum" part of quantum mechanics comes from. Planck himself didn't believe in either atoms or discrete bits of light, but his concept was given a boost in 1905, when Einstein published a paper, " Concerning an Heuristic Point of View Toward the Emission and Transformation of Light."Įinstein envisioned light traveling not as a wave, but as some manner of "energy quanta." This packet of energy, Einstein suggested in his paper, could "be absorbed or generated only as a whole," specifically when an atom "jumps" between quantized vibration rates. This idea flew in the face of ideas about light at the time, when most physicists believed that light was a continuous wave and not a tiny packet. The problem was that Boltzmann's work relied on the fact that any given gas was made from tiny particles, meaning that light, too, was made from discrete bits. Planck realized that equations used by physicist Ludwig Boltzmann to describe the behavior of gases could be translated into an explanation for this relationship between temperature and color. In 1900, German physicist Max Planck was trying to explain why objects at specific temperatures, like the 1,470-degree-Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius) filament of a light bulb, glowed a specific color - in this case, red, according to the Perimeter Institute.
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