and
characteristic for the system in question.
Let us now, however, take the effect of the energy radiation into account, calculated in the ordinary way from the acceleration of the electron. In this case the electron will no longer describe stationary orbits.
will continuously increase, and the electron will approach the nucleus describing orbits of smaller and smaller dimensions, and with greater and greater frequency; the electron on the average gaining in kinetic energy at the same time as the whole system loses energy. This process will go on until the dimensions of the orbit are of the same order of magnitude as the dimensions of the electron or those of the nucleus. A simple calculation shows that the energy radiated out during the process considered will be enormously great compared with that radiated out by ordinary molecular processes.
It is obvious that the behaviour of such a system will be very different from that of an atomic system occurring in nature. In the first place, the actual atoms in their permanent state seem to have absolutely fixed dimensions and frequencies. Further, if we consider any molecular process, the result seems always to be that after a certain amount of energy characteristic for the systems in question is radiated out, the systems will again settle down in a stable state of equilibrium, in which the distances apart of the particles are of the same order of magnitude as before the process.
Now the essential point in Planck’s theory of radiation is that the energy radiation from an atomic system does not take place in the continuous way assumed in the ordinary electrodynamics, but that it, on the contrary, takes place in distinctly separated emissions, the amount of energy radiated out from an atomic vibrator of frequency
