Transition to a New Theory. By 1925 the machinery of current theory had developed another flaw and was urgently calling for reconstruction; Bohr’s model of the atom had quite definitely broken down. This is the model, now very familiar, which pictures the atom as a kind of solar system with a central positively charged nucleus and a number of elecrons describing orbits about it like planets, the important feature being that the possible orbits are limited by the rules referred to on [p. 190]. Since each line in the spectrum of the atom is emitted by the jump of an electron between two particular orbits, the classification of the spectral lines must run parallel with the classification of the orbits by their quantum numbers in the model. When the spectroscopists started to unravel the various series of lines in the spectra they found it possible to assign an orbit jump for every line—they could say what each line meant in terms of the model. But now questions of finer detail have arisen for which this correspondence ceases to hold. One must not expect too much from a model, and it would have been no surprise if the model had failed to exhibit minor phenomena or if its accuracy had proved imperfect. But the kind of trouble now arising was that only two orbit jumps were provided in the model to represent three obviously associated spectral lines; and so on. The model which had been so helpful in the interpretation of spectra up to a point, suddenly became altogether misleading; and spectroscopists were forced to turn away from the model and complete their classification of lines in a way which ignored it. They continued to speak of orbits and orbit jumps but there was no longer a complete one-to-one correspondence with the orbits shown in the model.[35]
The time was evidently ripe for the birth of a new theory. The situation then prevailing may be summarised as follows:
(1) The general working rule was to employ the classical laws with the supplementary proviso that whenever anything of the nature of action appears it must be made equal to
, or sometimes to an integral multiple of
.
(2) The proviso often led to a self-contradictory use of the classical theory. Thus in the Bohr atom the acceleration of the electron in its orbit would be governed by classical electrodynamics whilst its radiation would be governed by the
rule. But in classical electrodynamics the acceleration and the radiation are indissolubly connected.