when you picture an atom you might picture it like this a positive nucleus with negatively charged electrons orbiting around the positive nucleus after all we always talk about electron orbitals so it seems natural to picture them orbiting this model of electrons orbiting a nucleus was proposed in 1909 by Ernest Rutherford and it was called the Rutherford model he said you can picture an atom kind of like a mini solar system with a high density nucleus at the center and the lighter electrons orbiting at high speeds around the outer edges but there's a major problem with this view if an electron is orbiting then it has a constant centripetal acceleration and when a charged particle accelerates it gives off radiation so it loses energy so we can calculate how much energy an electron loses if it were to continually orbit a nucleus using the larmora formula we can calculate that an electron would lose all its energy in about 10 picoseconds or about .01 nanoseconds then it would crash into the nucleus so if this is true then an atom couldn't be stable for more than a few picoseconds but obviously that isn't true since you're made of atoms and you're more than a few picoseconds old so a better idea of the electrons in an atom isn't to picture them as particles orbiting but rather picture them as standing waves around a nucleus so what does this mean well a great analog to this description is just to take a metal ring like this let's say that this ring is an electron that surrounds the nucleus of an atom if I vibrate this ring slowly nothing happens but as I increase the frequency it suddenly starts to resonate so we now have a standing wave in a circle this looks so cool but notice something here I can increase the energy by turning up the frequency of vibration but suddenly the resonance goes away and it just looks like a normal ring again but then suddenly if I keep increasing it then I get another standing wave this time with more nodes and then another higher mode here there's another one and still finally one Higher One here notice that I don't get any standing waves in between these frequencies so there are only certain energy inputs that are allowed in order for standing waves to occur for a standing wave to form in a circle an integral number of wavelengths must fit within the circumference this means that only some discrete wavelengths are allowed to form in a circle of a given radius What's Happening Here is exactly what Niels Bohr proposed is happening in an atom the electron can only increase in energy with discrete intervals just like in our ring experiment here the ring doesn't vibrate unless I give it some specific energy input so the energies of this ring and the energies of electrons are quantized meaning that they only come in discrete packets so they found that it's necessary that electrons move to different vibrations through Quantum leaps there's no smooth transition from one vibration to the next they jump to different vibrations that we still call orbitals even though nothing is orbiting the resonant frequencies of an electron look like this these are the possible orbitals of an electron orbiting around a proton but that leads to another question in this experiment we have a ring vibrating but in the case of an electron what's actually vibrating and before we continue I'd like to thank the sponsor for this video better help these last few years have been difficult for everyone and one of the most important things you can do in times like this is to focus on your mental health betterhelp is the world's largest therapy service and it's a hundred percent online with better help you can tap into a network of over 25 000 licensed and experienced therapists who can help you with a wide range of issues to get started you just answer a few questions about your needs and preferences in therapy that way better health can match you with the right therapist from their Network then you can talk to your therapist however you feel comfortable whether it's via text chat phone or video call you can message your therapist anytime and schedule a live session when it's convenient for you if your therapist isn't the right fit for you for any reason you can switch to a new therapist at no additional charge as well with better help you get the same professionalism and quality you expect from in-office therapy but with a therapist who is custom picked for you more scheduling flexibility in a more affordable price so get 10 off your first month at betterhelp.com action lab or you can click the link in the description and thanks for better help for sponsoring this video now let's get back to the experiment so what's actually vibrating in the case of an electron well the truth is there's nothing physical that's actually vibrating whenever we try to measure where an electron is we never see it spread out in a wave like this like this ring here we always see it as a little particle never a wave like we described here for example in the first resonant frequency of an electron around a proton it looks like this this is also called the S orbital but when we measure where an electron is in a real s orbital we find that it's here or here or here or here or here or here here it always is in some random spot but when we measure it a lot of times we find that where the dots are spread out in space start to look like the original electron orbital look like so what we find is that the electron orbitals show us the resonant frequencies of an electron and this helps us know where the electrons likely to be found when we measure it so if we take the square of the wave function of the electron in a specific orbital we find that it gives us the probability of finding an electron in that specific place so a vibrating ring can become a great analog for understanding electron orbitals but it's not perfect another difference is that the ring provides molds with an odd number of half wavelengths but a Bohr model to the atom allows molds with an even number of wavelengths and the reason for that is how the ring is actually attached to the vibration apparatus and thanks for watching another episode of the action lab and we'll see you next time