After a breathe taking thermodynamics, here we go again another nerve racking topic; Coulomb’s Law.
This week’s lesson is all about the Coulomb’s Law, so if there’s two of the same charges when combined together, they will likely to repel from each other like for example both are positive (+) charges and when there are two different charges, they will attract to each other like positive (+) and negative (–) charge.
It can be expressed by the formula F=kq1q2/r2. Where F is the electric force, k is what is called the Coulomb’s constant (9×109Nm2/C2), q1 is the charge on the first object, q2 is the charge on the second object and r is the distance between the two charges.
Furthermore, so it can be said that Coulomb’s Law calculates the electric force between two charges based on the formula. If q1, q2 and r is given, then you can compute for the Fnet of the two charges.
After we did some activities and after our discussions, we had observed that if it has a greater charge then it will have a greater force. So in the question,
Why the electron doesn’t fall into the nucleus?
On 1902, it became clear that a tiny object such as the electron cannot be treated as a classical particle having a definite position and velocity based on what I’ve read and so, the best way we can do is to specify the probability of its manifesting itself at any point in space. In addition, according to Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle mentioned that you can never know the exact position and the exact speed of an object because everything in the universe behaves like both a particle and a wave at the same time. It only means that we cannot really say that an electron can be called as a particle that have an exact location and speed, it is because in quantum mechanics, the exact position and speed of an object have no meaning.
Moreover, it is not proper to say that electrons fall into the nucleus because it is impossible to determine its speed and location. The best thing we can do is to specify the probability of its manifesting itself at any point in space. We could see something like this if only we had a super advance technologies that can capture the movement of electron on the 1s of hydrogen atom and it would give you a resulting image that have the combined dots. The closer we move toward the nucleus, more likely we found the electron. This is confirmed by this plot which shows the quantity of electron charge per unit volume of space at various distances from the nucleus. This is known as a probability density plot. The per unit volume of space part is very important here, as we consider radii closer to the nucleus, these volumes become very small, so the number of electrons per unit volume increases rapidly.
Therefore, it appears as if the electron does fall into the nucleus. Its potential energy dives down toward minus-infinity, and its kinetic energy as the electron approaches the tiny volume of space occupied by the nucleus.
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