Why is Bohr's model of the atom still taught in schools when Schrodinger's model is more accurate? - by Steve Baker - Quora Question Review
This document contains a review of the answer by Steve Baker on the question in Quora: "Why is Bohr's model of the atom still taught in schools when Schrodinger's model is more accurate?"
To order to read all the answers select:
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Bohrs-model-of-the-atom-still-taught-in-schools-when-Schrodingers-model-is-more-accurate
- The text in italics is copied from the article.
- Immediate followed by some comments
Contents
Reflection
1. Answer Review
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It’s worse than that, because of course Bohr’s model is completely wrong, both conceptually and in terms of agreement with experiment.
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This requires more facts. The most important is to evaluate both based on experiments. Unfortunate this document does not give any hint.
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I can tell you a story about that: my colleague John Archibald Wheeler, who was here at UT in the latter part of his career, and who worked closely with Bohr in the 1930s, and remained a close friend thereafter, said that he never saw Bohr get upset (he was famously soft-spoken and even-tempered) except when Bohr thumbed through some introductory text in modern physics and saw the Bohr model included. He would say things like, “What the hell is wrong with these people? Quantum physics has existed since 1920! When is it going to appear in these books?”
It’s a losing battle to include correct modern physics in any introductory text, I fear. The standard cartoon of an atom is the Bohr atom, and if someone were to replace it with the fuzzy probability blob of an actual atom, no one except physicists would know what the image was supposed to be. Right now, in the 2020s, introductory texts that use calculus make some token effort to introduce quantum physics, or at least the results of application of quantum physics… a century late!… but as you can see from questions on Quora, the average joe has no concept whatsoever of what an atom is or what laws atoms obey.
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Reflection 1 - Question Review
The question: "Why is Bohr's model of the atom still taught in schools when Schrodinger's model is more accurate?" requires at least a defintion what both Bohr's model and the Schrodinger's model are.
For the Bohr model read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr_model
For the Schrödinger's model read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger_equation
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Created: 1 June 2023
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