The Bohring Part of Physics is Wrong

Atomic Rant

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Overall I agree — there are a lot of people who seem to remember the Bohr atom but not that it’s wrong. Unfortunately, some of them seem to want to build their own personal physics theories on it. I understand the motivation to teach it — there is an historical context, and it’s an opportunity to dip one’s toe into some quantum theory rather than jumping into the deep end.

One nit, though. Even thinking of electrons as “buzzing around the nucleus” still implies a trajectory and motion, and you get into trouble trying to reconcile those classical notions with angular momentum, which is one of the failures of the Bohr model: the S orbital has no orbital angular momentum.

I do like the orbital ballon animals, but I don’t recommend a science clown doing them for kids’ parties.