Spectra and Atoms continued:
What does this have to do with light and spectral lines?
Lots of clever experiments around the turn of the century demonstrated that:
light can be thought of as a stream of ``quanta'' called photons. Each photon carries an energy
(h is ``Planck's constant'',
is the frequency).
Atoms had a crazy structure in which only certain orbits were allowed for the electrons - that word again, the orbits are ``quantized''.
``g''
lowest energy configuration
``1''
higher energy configuration
``2''
higher energy yet
etc. right on up to where the electron is no longer bound to the atom.
Michael Bolte
Wed Jan 14 12:55:54 PST 1998