2100: Models of the Atom - Revision history

FaviFake: I have no idea what you just said???

2025-04-20T17:41:30Z

I have no idea what you just said???

162.158.33.249: Whether they're em-dashes or en-dashes or whatever, the point being that "foo - bar" doesn't actually look as much like "foo-bar" as "foo—bar" does, especially with certain fonts. To contrast the extra spaces, I've now also removed other unused ones.

2025-04-19T14:00:47Z

Whether they're em-dashes or en-dashes or whatever, the point being that "foo - bar" doesn't actually look as much like "foo-bar" as "foo—bar" does, especially with certain fonts. To contrast the extra spaces, I've now also removed other unused ones.

FaviFake: fyu, they're called em dashes

2025-04-19T11:18:51Z

fyu, they're called em dashes

172.71.241.40: /* Explanation */ ...missed some, anyway.

2025-04-19T09:33:01Z

‎Explanation: ...missed some, anyway.

172.71.26.100: /* Explanation */ Redoing the potentially more ambiguous "non-hyphen"s

2025-04-19T09:29:30Z

‎Explanation: Redoing the potentially more ambiguous "non-hyphen"s

FaviFake: /* Trivia */ In the title text, Randall referenced Thomson but misspelled it as "J.J. Thompson". In the comic image, he also seems to have forgotten to underline the year "1913". Neither of these mistakes have been fixed.

2025-04-19T07:30:32Z

‎Trivia: In the title text, Randall referenced Thomson but misspelled it as "J.J. Thompson". In the comic image, he also seems to have forgotten to underline the year "1913". Neither of these mistakes have been fixed.

FaviFake: /* Trivia */

2025-04-19T07:30:13Z

‎Trivia

FaviFake: /* Explanation */

2025-04-19T07:28:35Z

‎Explanation

172.71.218.66: /* Transcript */

2025-04-19T01:56:30Z

‎Transcript

FaviFake: /* Trivia */

2025-03-02T16:46:17Z

‎Trivia

← Older revision		Revision as of 17:41, 20 April 2025
Line 8:		Line 8:

	==Explanation==		==Explanation==
−
	This comic humorously describes the changing view of what an {{w\|atom}} is. This has happened so much it seems that we never really knew what we are looking at, and there have been many competing theories aside from the mainstream ones we are taught in school. Randall lists major depictions in the history of our understanding of an atom, and adds a few humorous ones in to poke fun at how diverse, contentious, and in retrospect often foolhardy, this history has been.		This comic humorously describes the changing view of what an {{w\|atom}} is. This has happened so much it seems that we never really knew what we are looking at, and there have been many competing theories aside from the mainstream ones we are taught in school. Randall lists major depictions in the history of our understanding of an atom, and adds a few humorous ones in to poke fun at how diverse, contentious, and in retrospect often foolhardy, this history has been.

@@ Line 8: / Line 8: @@
 ==Explanation==
-This comic humorously describes the changing view of what an {{w|atom}} is.  This has happened so much it seems that we never really knew what we are looking at, and there have been many competing theories aside from the mainstream ones we are taught in school.  Randall lists major depictions in the history of our understanding of an atom, and adds a few humorous ones in to poke fun at how diverse, contentious, and in retrospect often foolhardy, this history has been.
 ;Small hard ball model
@@ Line 20: / Line 21: @@
 ;Rutherford model
-:The tentative winner in the battle was the model of Thomson's student {{w|Ernest Rutherford}}, who discovered from electrostatic scattering experiments that the positive charge seemed to be concentrated in the center of the atom, and proposed his {{w|Rutherford model}}, or "planetary model", in 1911, where electrons orbit a very concentrated positive charge. This model has often been compared to the orbit of the planets around the sun, with the electrostatic attraction of the electrons and protons shaping the orbits, rather than gravity.  This is the fourth model in the comic.
+:The tentative winner in the battle was the model of Thomson's student {{w|Ernest Rutherford}}, who discovered from electrostatic scattering experiments that the positive charge seemed to be concentrated in the center of the atom, and proposed his {{w|Rutherford model}}, or "planetary model", in 1911, where electrons orbit a very concentrated positive charge. This model has often been compared to the orbit of the planets around the sun, with the electrostatic attraction of the electrons and protons shaping the orbits, rather than gravity. This is the fourth model in the comic.
 ;Bohr model
-:The Rutherford model could not explain the discrete spectral lines in absorption and emission spectra. It also did not explain why electrons did not spiral in to the nucleus.  {{w|Niels Bohr}} patched the model up by proposing that electrons could only exist in distinct "energy levels" at discrete distances from the nucleus.  The 1913 "{{w|Bohr model}}", the fifth model shown here, was part of beginning quantum mechanics.  Physics behaves differently at the small scale of atoms than the large scales we are more familiar with.
+:The Rutherford model could not explain the discrete spectral lines in absorption and emission spectra. It also did not explain why electrons did not spiral in to the nucleus. {{w|Niels Bohr}} patched the model up by proposing that electrons could only exist in distinct "energy levels" at discrete distances from the nucleus. The 1913 "{{w|Bohr model}}", the fifth model shown here, was part of beginning quantum mechanics. Physics behaves differently at the small scale of atoms than the large scales we are more familiar with.
 ;Nunchuck model
-:Randall facetiously suggests a "{{w|Nunchaku|nunchuck}} model", the sixth model shown, of a packet of protons swinging a packet of electrons around.  One can imagine a handle filled with electrons bonded by the strong nuclear force to a chain made of neutrons, bonded again by the strong nuclear force to a handle made of protons.  The heavier protonic handle acts loosely as an orbital center as the electron-filled opposite handle swings wildly around it, attempting to resolve its electrostatic attraction within the restraints of its chain.
+:Randall facetiously suggests a "{{w|Nunchaku|nunchuck}} model", the sixth model shown, of a packet of protons swinging a packet of electrons around. One can imagine a handle filled with electrons bonded by the strong nuclear force to a chain made of neutrons, bonded again by the strong nuclear force to a handle made of protons. The heavier protonic handle acts loosely as an orbital center as the electron-filled opposite handle swings wildly around it, attempting to resolve its electrostatic attraction within the restraints of its chain.
 ;Chadwick model
-:The next refinement was in the structure of the nucleus.  Note that at this time, nobody thought of splitting up the nucleus into {{w|proton}}s and {{w|neutron}}s. But pretty soon people noticed that protons and neutrons existed;  {{w|James Chadwick}}, who discovered the neutron, figured that the atom had a nucleus of neutrons and protons, along with a bunch of electrons orbiting around it in a Bohrish manner. This is what the layman today often thinks of as an atom, and is the seventh model shown here.
+:The next refinement was in the structure of the nucleus. Note that at this time, nobody thought of splitting up the nucleus into {{w|proton}}s and {{w|neutron}}s. But pretty soon people noticed that protons and neutrons existed; {{w|James Chadwick}}, who discovered the neutron, figured that the atom had a nucleus of neutrons and protons, along with a bunch of electrons orbiting around it in a Bohrish manner. This is what the layman today often thinks of as an atom, and is the seventh model shown here.
 ;538 model
-:The eighth model shown is a made up "538 model," in 2008. {{w|FiveThirtyEight}} is a statistical analysis website that gained fame in 2008 for predicting every race but 2 correctly in the {{w|2008 United States presidential election|US presidential election}} and predicting every state and Obama's win in the 2012 election. Unlike most other media and polling institutes it saw a rather high probability of 29% for Trump to win the 2016 election by summing up the uncertainties in all the battle states. It has since been known for making mathematical models for everything; the model jokingly suggests that 538 has modeled and presumably made predictions about the atom. The {{w|pie chart}} shows the statistical composition of neutrons, protons and electrons, 38%, 31%, and 31% respectively. This could either be the average of a massive body with several isotopes or represent gallium-69, the most abundant {{w|Isotopes of gallium|isotope of gallium}}, with 31 protons, 31 electrons and 38 neutrons. FiveThirtyEight has previously been mentioned in several xkcd comics, including in [[477: Typewriter]], [[500: Election]], [[635: Locke and Demosthenes]], [[1130: Poll Watching]], [[1779: 2017]], and [[2002: LeBron James and Stephen Curry]].  It's appropriate to list the 538 model as a precursor to the quantum model, as it is a step towards considering the likelihood of different quantities of subatomic particles to be in different volumes of space, rather than considering them as strictly kinematic particles.  The comic moves this development into 2008 in support of this joke, when it was actually made much earlier.
+:The eighth model shown is a made up "538 model," in 2008. {{w|FiveThirtyEight}} is a statistical analysis website that gained fame in 2008 for predicting every race but 2 correctly in the {{w|2008 United States presidential election|US presidential election}} and predicting every state and Obama's win in the 2012 election. Unlike most other media and polling institutes it saw a rather high probability of 29% for Trump to win the 2016 election by summing up the uncertainties in all the battle states. It has since been known for making mathematical models for everything; the model jokingly suggests that 538 has modeled and presumably made predictions about the atom. The {{w|pie chart}} shows the statistical composition of neutrons, protons and electrons, 38%, 31%, and 31% respectively. This could either be the average of a massive body with several isotopes or represent gallium-69, the most abundant {{w|Isotopes of gallium|isotope of gallium}}, with 31 protons, 31 electrons and 38 neutrons. FiveThirtyEight has previously been mentioned in several xkcd comics, including in [[477: Typewriter]], [[500: Election]], [[635: Locke and Demosthenes]], [[1130: Poll Watching]], [[1779: 2017]], and [[2002: LeBron James and Stephen Curry]]. It's appropriate to list the 538 model as a precursor to the quantum model, as it is a step towards considering the likelihood of different quantities of subatomic particles to be in different volumes of space, rather than considering them as strictly kinematic particles. The comic moves this development into 2008 in support of this joke, when it was actually made much earlier.
 ;Quantum model
 :But the Chadwick model is not what scientists endorse today. {{w|Maxwell's equations|The theory of electromagnetism}} says that accelerated charges, like the electrons circling, would lose energy emitted as electromagnetic waves and would quickly orbit into the nucleus. Bohr only postulated that this would not happen, but his model could not explain why. Another problem{{Citation needed}} is that atoms, even the hydrogen atom, are not flat — which they would be, if a single electron orbited in a circular or elliptical trajectory (the circular motion of charge results in a magnetic moment; Otto Stern and Walter Gerlach {{w|Stern–Gerlach experiment|showed}} that independent from the direction of the measurement the angular momentum — for certain elements — always has the maximum positive or negative value, i.e. not only the radius, but also the angular momentum is quantized — and never zero. You cannot 'look at' the atom from above and 'see' the orbital circle. It always 'seems', as if you 'looked' from the side and would measure the full magnetic dipole. Stern and Gerlach actually saw the spin of an electron of the silver atom instead of the angular momentum, which is according to quantum mechanics 0).
 :Today (i.e. actually since 1926, 29 years after the discovery of the electron) physicists subscribe to a quantum model, which is the ninth model shown here. Instead of electrons with definite location and momentum (~speed), the parts of the atom are described by probability fields of possible locations and momentums. The changes in momentum probability normally cancel each other out, so there is no electromagnetic radiation.
 ;"Small hard ball surrounded by math" model
 :Although the "quantum model" of today is already very abstract, the next model is postulated to get ''so abstract'' that it is just a "small hard ball surrounded by math". The last model shown is thus remarkably similar to the model we started out from, the "small hard ball model" (without the math).
-:The picture for the "small ball surrounded by math" depicts a circle with several numbers around it. While the numbers seem to symbolize the "surrounding math" in a general sense, some of them suggest constants used in actual mathematical equations or other numbers related to the quantum model.  The shapes and densities of the atomic orbitals are calculated with the {{w|Schrödinger equation}}, which is complex and difficult to solve. For this reason atoms are generally precisely considered in only very simple simulations, and the details of interactions of many atoms at large scales that form our daily lives are incredibly hard to precisely understand and predict on an atomic level.  It comes down to "these roundish things we call atoms are moving around in these approximate ways obeying this complex equation with too many numbers involved in most situations to accurately model, so let's use a different, empirically derived formula that describes the behavior of the system in general."
+:The picture for the "small ball surrounded by math" depicts a circle with several numbers around it. While the numbers seem to symbolize the "surrounding math" in a general sense, some of them suggest constants used in actual mathematical equations or other numbers related to the quantum model. The shapes and densities of the atomic orbitals are calculated with the {{w|Schrödinger equation}}, which is complex and difficult to solve. For this reason atoms are generally precisely considered in only very simple simulations, and the details of interactions of many atoms at large scales that form our daily lives are incredibly hard to precisely understand and predict on an atomic level. It comes down to "these roundish things we call atoms are moving around in these approximate ways obeying this complex equation with too many numbers involved in most situations to accurately model, so let's use a different, empirically derived formula that describes the behavior of the system in general."
 :This model is probably a reference to the {{w|mathematical universe hypothesis}} and, as a striking case of [[2203: Prescience|prescience]], may be seen as a prediction of April 2020’s {{w|Stephen Wolfram#Wolfram Physics Project|Wolfram Physics Project}}.
@@ Line 100: / Line 101: @@
 [[Category:Charts]]
-[[Category:Comics featuring real people]]  <!-- title text -->
+[[Category:Comics featuring real people]] <!-- title text -->
 [[Category:Physics]]
 [[Category:Animals]] <!-- birds -->
 [[Category:Nobel Prize]]

← Older revision		Revision as of 11:18, 19 April 2025
Line 8:		Line 8:

	==Explanation==		==Explanation==
−
	This comic humorously describes the changing view of what an {{w\|atom}} is. This has happened so much it seems that we never really knew what we are looking at, and there have been many competing theories aside from the mainstream ones we are taught in school. Randall lists major depictions in the history of our understanding of an atom, and adds a few humorous ones in to poke fun at how diverse, contentious, and in retrospect often foolhardy, this history has been.		This comic humorously describes the changing view of what an {{w\|atom}} is. This has happened so much it seems that we never really knew what we are looking at, and there have been many competing theories aside from the mainstream ones we are taught in school. Randall lists major depictions in the history of our understanding of an atom, and adds a few humorous ones in to poke fun at how diverse, contentious, and in retrospect often foolhardy, this history has been.

@@ Line 36: / Line 36: @@
 ;Quantum model
-:But the Chadwick model is not what scientists endorse today. {{w|Maxwell's equations|The theory of electromagnetism}} says that accelerated charges, like the electrons circling, would lose energy emitted as electromagnetic waves and would quickly orbit into the nucleus. Bohr only postulated that this would not happen, but his model could not explain why. Another problem{{Citation needed}} is that atoms, even the hydrogen atom, are not flat - which they would be, if a single electron orbited in a circular or elliptical trajectory (the circular motion of charge results in a magnetic moment; Otto Stern and Walter Gerlach {{w|Stern–Gerlach experiment|showed}} that independent from the direction of the measurement the angular momentum — for certain elements — always has the maximum positive or negative value, i.e. not only the radius, but also the angular momentum is quantized - and never zero. You cannot 'look at' the atom from above and 'see' the orbital circle. It always 'seems', as if you 'looked' from the side and would measure the full magnetic dipole. Stern and Gerlach actually saw the spin of an electron of the silver atom instead of the angular momentum, which is according to quantum mechanics 0).
+:But the Chadwick model is not what scientists endorse today. {{w|Maxwell's equations|The theory of electromagnetism}} says that accelerated charges, like the electrons circling, would lose energy emitted as electromagnetic waves and would quickly orbit into the nucleus. Bohr only postulated that this would not happen, but his model could not explain why. Another problem{{Citation needed}} is that atoms, even the hydrogen atom, are not flat — which they would be, if a single electron orbited in a circular or elliptical trajectory (the circular motion of charge results in a magnetic moment; Otto Stern and Walter Gerlach {{w|Stern–Gerlach experiment|showed}} that independent from the direction of the measurement the angular momentum — for certain elements — always has the maximum positive or negative value, i.e. not only the radius, but also the angular momentum is quantized — and never zero. You cannot 'look at' the atom from above and 'see' the orbital circle. It always 'seems', as if you 'looked' from the side and would measure the full magnetic dipole. Stern and Gerlach actually saw the spin of an electron of the silver atom instead of the angular momentum, which is according to quantum mechanics 0).
 :Today (i.e. actually since 1926, 29 years after the discovery of the electron) physicists subscribe to a quantum model, which is the ninth model shown here. Instead of electrons with definite location and momentum (~speed), the parts of the atom are described by probability fields of possible locations and momentums. The changes in momentum probability normally cancel each other out, so there is no electromagnetic radiation.

@@ Line 36: / Line 36: @@
 ;Quantum model
-:But the Chadwick model is not what scientists endorse today. {{w|Maxwell's equations|The theory of electromagnetism}} says that accelerated charges, like the electrons circling, would lose energy emitted as electromagnetic waves and would quickly orbit into the nucleus. Bohr only postulated that this would not happen, but his model could not explain why. Another problem{{Citation needed}} is that atoms, even the hydrogen atom, are not flat - which they would be, if a single electron orbited in a circular or elliptical trajectory (the circular motion of charge results in a magnetic moment; Otto Stern and Walter Gerlach {{w|Stern–Gerlach experiment|showed}} that independent from the direction of the measurement the angular momentum—for certain elements—always has the maximum positive or negative value, i.e. not only the radius, but also the angular momentum is quantized - and never zero. You cannot 'look at' the atom from above and 'see' the orbital circle. It always 'seems', as if you 'looked' from the side and would measure the full magnetic dipole. Stern and Gerlach actually saw the spin of an electron of the silver atom instead of the angular momentum, which is according to quantum mechanics 0).
+:But the Chadwick model is not what scientists endorse today. {{w|Maxwell's equations|The theory of electromagnetism}} says that accelerated charges, like the electrons circling, would lose energy emitted as electromagnetic waves and would quickly orbit into the nucleus. Bohr only postulated that this would not happen, but his model could not explain why. Another problem{{Citation needed}} is that atoms, even the hydrogen atom, are not flat - which they would be, if a single electron orbited in a circular or elliptical trajectory (the circular motion of charge results in a magnetic moment; Otto Stern and Walter Gerlach {{w|Stern–Gerlach experiment|showed}} that independent from the direction of the measurement the angular momentum — for certain elements — always has the maximum positive or negative value, i.e. not only the radius, but also the angular momentum is quantized - and never zero. You cannot 'look at' the atom from above and 'see' the orbital circle. It always 'seems', as if you 'looked' from the side and would measure the full magnetic dipole. Stern and Gerlach actually saw the spin of an electron of the silver atom instead of the angular momentum, which is according to quantum mechanics 0).
 :Today (i.e. actually since 1926, 29 years after the discovery of the electron) physicists subscribe to a quantum model, which is the ninth model shown here. Instead of electrons with definite location and momentum (~speed), the parts of the atom are described by probability fields of possible locations and momentums. The changes in momentum probability normally cancel each other out, so there is no electromagnetic radiation.

@@ Line 96: / Line 96: @@
 ==Trivia==
-In the title text, [[Randall]] referenced Thomson but misspelled it as "J.J. Thompson". In the comic image, he also seems to have forgotten to underline the year "1913". Neither of these mistakes has been fixed.
+In the title text, [[Randall]] referenced Thomson but misspelled it as "J.J. Thompson". In the comic image, he also seems to have forgotten to underline the year "1913". Neither of these mistakes have been fixed.
 {{comic discussion}}

@@ Line 47: / Line 47: @@
 ==Transcript==
 :[Heading:]
 :<big>Models of the Atom</big>