Since the very early days of our species, we have pondered the fundamental workings of the world and universe around us. This obsession with making sense of a seemingly chaotic and often scary world ...

Photo: Niels Bohr's research notes for his new atomic theory Rutherford's find came from a very strange experience. Everyone at that time imagined the atom as a "plum pudding." That is, it was roughly ...

Niels Bohr's model of the hydrogen atom—first published 100 years ago and commemorated in a special issue of Nature—is simple, elegant, revolutionary, and wrong. Well, "wrong" isn't exactly ...

The Bohr atom is unquestionably a landmark in the history of physics. A century after its publication, it has inspired a remarkably diverse and ever-growing field of research. But to fully grasp the ...

John L. Heilbron describes the route that led Niels Bohr to quantize electron orbits a century ago. You have full access to this article via your institution ...

Picture an atom, and you may imagine spherical electrons orbiting a nucleus packed with particles like neutrons. Only certain orbits - quantum levels - are possible. It's a simplistic model, yet ...

The quest to comprehend atomic structure began in earnest in the early 1800s. British scientist John Dalton proposed an early atomic theory, picturing atoms as tiny, solid, indivisible spheres. This ...