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I am an agriculture student, and we study tons of chemistry, and despite I took the exams I still have a good doubt on atoms.

Through my studies I would say electrons are very tiny containers of energy, which can contain between a minimum and a maximum of such energy, depending on how much energy they absorb and emit. My question is, what force acts in order to keep the electron away from colliding with the protons in the nucleus? And how do lower energy state electrons keep the higher energy ones more external towards the atomic ray? Shouldn't higher energy electrons suffer more the attraction of the nucleus?

I am interested on a qualitative understanding, I would be glad if someone can explain me this pretty well since despite the numerous videos and professor talks it is not still clear to me.

Giorgio Vitanza
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  • Some of your questions are answered in http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9415/why-do-electrons-occupy-the-space-around-nuclei-and-not-collide-with-them and http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20003/why-dont-electrons-crash-into-the-nuclei-they-orbit? – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten May 21 '16 at 16:21
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    I should add that while " I would say electrons are very tiny containers of energy, which can contain between a minimum and a maximum of such energy, depending on how much energy they absorb and emit" is probably good enough to get though some basic chemistry classes, it is almost completely wrong and you should abandon it posthaste. An electron is an entity with well-defined mass and charge (and spin and lepton quantum number) that obeys quantum mechanics (real quantum mechanics, don't think Bohr model here, it was wrong from day one). – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten May 21 '16 at 16:24
  • Yes sir you answered these questions, but yet I am not able to get a picture out of them. I am looking for a purely intuitive way of looking at this relationships. I know that electrons have wave prevailing behavior despite their wave matter duality, so I imagine a cloud where a maximum of two electrons move. Of course we can't know the position of the electron since what we are to know of it is wavelenght and frequency, not a point. Proton behaves similarly I guess, but has opposite charge as far as I know, so I can't get why they don't collide. I'm looking to picture this, not for equations. – Giorgio Vitanza May 21 '16 at 18:18
  • You have to think about a rather curious kind of non-linear wave phenomenon that has vibrations at certain (very high) frequencies. Those are the elementary "particles". These vibrations can arrange themselves in secondary structures called nuclei and atoms that have different (lower) vibration frequencies of their own. These atoms then form molecules with even lower vibration frequencies and those can then make solids with very low vibration frequencies. We usually don't teach it this way because it's fairly useless, but that's what is really going on, "intuitively" speaking. – CuriousOne May 21 '16 at 19:48
  • Ok @CuriousOne you got what I meant. Can you go a little deeper and explain me how this affects the relationship between protons and electrons? I'll give you the correct answer if you can get me to picture this – Giorgio Vitanza May 22 '16 at 08:38
  • The reason why I said that this image is fairly useless is exactly why nobody is using it. We can't calculate anything with it and that's why we teach the full theory which makes this quantitative. If you want to know how atoms "work", you will have to learn non-relativistic quantum mechanics. There is simply no way around that. – CuriousOne May 22 '16 at 08:53
  • @CuriousOne Yes I understand that, but sir I know about the ΔH, the electromagnetic spectrum etc. I know that these are the things we would look at to deal with reactions between atoms and molecules within their acid or base behavior. But this question was not made for utility purposes, I was just curious to have a clear qualitative picture of the microworld in its deepest layer, instead of mere values, and I understand it is not an easy one. – Giorgio Vitanza May 22 '16 at 15:51
  • If you want to have a qualitative picture of the microscopic world at its deepest level, then, I am afraid, you will have to study quantum field theory on top. To be honest, at some point the question sounds lazy... you want the reward, but you don't want to do the work. – CuriousOne May 22 '16 at 21:44
  • @CuriousOne http://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/51568/what-is-the-reason-why-protons-and-electrons-do-not-collide/51576#51576 – Giorgio Vitanza May 23 '16 at 09:07

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You are unlucky, because the microworld of electrons nuclei, atoms and molecules has been studied with mathematical models for over a hundred years and it is not open to hand waving hypothesis of the type: I would say electrons are very tiny containers of energy, which can contain between a minimum and a maximum of such energy, depending on how much energy they absorb and emit

My question is, what force acts in order to keep the electron away from colliding with the protons in the nucleus?

This was one of the basic questions that formulated first the Bohr model of the atom and then the Schrodinger equation which led to the theory of quantum mechanics..

Instead of the electron falling continuously on the nucleus, experiments showed that a discrete spectrum was obtained, with a ground state where the electron has a stable orbital.

And how do lower energy state electrons keep the higher energy ones more external towards the atomic ray? Shouldn't higher energy electrons suffer more the attraction of the nucleus?

Electrons in the higher quantized states will cascade down to the ground state releasing energy as photons.

The electric potential of the nucleus, used in the Schrodinger equation, gives solutions whose complex conjugate square give the probability for the electron to be at a specific orbital. The closer to the nucleus the more energy will be needed to free the electron, which energy has to be quantized .

Quantum mechanics has to be studied mathematically, to be really understood. The Bohr model of the hydrogen atom is useful to start with, but it is the Schrodinger equation that is the real quantum mechanical model .

anna v
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  • Yes I understand that, and it is good enough as an answer. I gave electrons this label of 'containers' thinking of the higher energy state they get through heat absorbtion for example. I was just interested on a mere picture. What I didn't really get is how comes the electron moving somewhere in the electron cloud won't hit the proton in the nucleus.. That's just it – Giorgio Vitanza May 21 '16 at 17:02
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I found the answer I was looking for in Chemistry S.E.

As you can see it is not that impossible to have a picture of what you calculate.

https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/51568/what-is-the-reason-why-protons-and-electrons-do-not-collide/51576#51576

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