Sean Carroll

But it was instantly realized that that can't be right because those electrons would give off light, lose energy, and spiral into the center of the nucleus.

But they don't.

In fact, atoms are pretty stable, matter is stable.

Our continued existence in the universe is evidence of that.

Now, how could you explain that?

And people came up with rather ad hoc ideas, like Niels Bohr just suggested that the possible orbits were just a discrete set.

Not every possible way that the electron could circle the nucleus was allowed.

Only some of them were allowed.

But it was not understood why that would be the case.

And it was finally Louis de Broglie and later Erwin Schrodinger who elaborated on this idea that said, let's think about electrons as waves rather than particles.

And we started talking about what is called the wave function of the electron.

And there's a very bad name, the wave function.

It's not nearly evocative enough for such a centrally important concept.

But there you go.

There you have it.

And it's also a little bit misleading for a reason I will tell you.

But let's first give the true but somewhat misleading story.

think about the electron as kind of a wave that lives in the vicinity of the nucleus of the atom.

And what Schrodinger did was provide an equation that this wave, this function, it's a complex valued function, but that's not gonna be important for anything we do.

Schrodinger's equation tells us the allowed solutions to different ways the electrons can behave.