Collections:Texts:Chemistry:Chapter 5 - THE ELECTRONIC STRUCTURE OF ATOMS
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THE ELECTRONIC STRUCTURE OF ATOMS
5.2 The Wave Nature of the Electron
5.3 Electron Waves in the Hydrogen Atom
5.4 The Potential Energy of Electrons
5.5 Atoms Having More Than One Electron
5.7 Electron Configurations and the Periodic Table
Once scientists had accepted the idea that electrons were constituents of all matter, theories attempting to explain just how electrons were incorporated in the structure of the atom began to develop. This was especially true after Rutherford had discovered that most of the volume of an atom was occupied by electrons. Both chemists and physicists became interested in the electronic structure of atoms—the chemists because they wanted to explain valence and bonding, and the physicists because they wanted to explain the spectra of atoms,the light emitted when gaseous atoms were raised to a high temperature or bombarded by electrons. The chief contributors to these developments, which occurred mainly during the 15 years between 1910 and 1925, were the U.S. chemist Gilbert Newton Lewis (1875 to 1946), and the Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962).
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