When Schrodinger developed his famous equation he used it to
model the waves of electrons in atoms. He and others found that for any given
element only certain waves fitted with his equation, and those waves had
particular energy values associated with them.
What was amazing was that the
differences between the energies of the waves in an atom exactly match
the energies of the photons of light that appeared in the element’s spectrum.
Here was an explanation of colour!
It seemed that electrons could jump between energy
levels in an atom. An electron in a low energy level could jump to a higher
energy by absorbing a photon that had exactly the right energy to make up the difference
between the two levels. Likewise an
electron in a higher energy level could drop to a lower one, giving off the
energy difference in an emitted photon.
Going back to the spectrum of hydrogen, the energies of the
photons that make up different coloured bands of light correspond exactly to
the jumps between the energy levels of electrons in a hydrogen atom that are
predicted by Schrodinger’s equation.
Imagine how exciting it must have been for Schrodinger to
have made calculations using his new equation
to find that they predicted something so fundamental as the colours of
elements, something that physics had never been able to explain before.
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