In 1913 Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1) published a groundbreaking atomic model. It got round a problem with Rutherford’s 1911 model (PHYSICS REVIEW Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 2–5) — a charged particle that accelerates (changes speed and/or direction) emits electromagnetic radiation, so electrons orbiting a nucleus should rapidly lose energy and spiral inwards.
Bohr’s first big idea was that angular momentum (2) of orbiting electrons is quantised, and the only possible orbits have:
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