Niels Bohr: Comparing the

atom to the solar system

Enter Niels Bohr in the early 1900s. Dr. Bohr was not an experimentalist like Thomson or
Rutherford. Bohr was a theorist, which basically means he sat around pondering things. Having
pondered his way to an “aha” moment, his job became to prove his ideas mathematically.
Bohr was aware of Rutherford’s gold foil experiment. It occurred to Bohr that the atom may
operate very much like the solar system, with most of the mass concentrated in the center
(at the sun), with smaller bodies (the planets) orbiting the center at specific distances.
According to this model, low-mass electrons in an atom orbit the central nucleus, which contains
all the massive protons and neutrons. This conceptual leap was neat, logical, and crazy.
The understanding of electricity and magnetism at the time suggested that there was no way
for a negative charge to orbit at a constant distance from a positive charge. Classic theories
suggested that an orbiting electron would eventually spiral into a central nucleus.
Bohr bypassed this problem with a neat little trick called “quantization of angular momentum.”
Basically, Bohr invented a whole new set of rules for how electrons should behave in
an atom. Strangely enough, the predictions of his mathematical model matched experiments
so well that nobody could prove him wrong. Although now an entire branch of physics,
called quantum mechanics, is much more accurate than Bohr’s model, his predictions are so
nearly right and so convenient that we gratefully leave quantum mechanics to math-happy
physicists. We’ll stick with the picture painted for us by Bohr.

36 Part I: Getting Cozy with Numbers, Atoms, and Elements

Q. Rutherford’s gold atoms contained 197
nuclear particles, 79 of which were protons.
How many neutrons and how many
electrons did each gold atom have?
A. 118 neutrons and 79 electrons. The
nucleus contains all of the protons and
neutrons in an atom, so if 79 of the 197
particles in a gold nucleus are protons, the
remaining 118 particles must be neutrons.
All atoms are electrically neutral, so
there must be a total of 79 electrons (in
other words, 79 negative charges) to balance
out the 79 positive charges of the
protons. This type of logic leads us to a
general formula that can be used to calculate
proton or neutron counts. This
formula is M = P + N, where M is the
atomic mass, P is the number of protons,
and N is the number of neutrons.
1. If an atom has 71 protons, 71 electrons, and
104 neutrons, how many particles reside in
the nucleus and how many outside of the
nucleus?
Solve It
2. If an atom’s nucleus weighs 31 amu and
contains 15 protons, how many neutrons
and electrons does the atom have?
Solve It