Atom Collapse?

What keeps electrons from falling into their parent nucleus when they’re at ground state? Take hydrogen as an example because I know electron shielding can happen with bigger nuclei. Also, do the protons and neutrons of a nucleus arrange themselves like electrons in orbitals?
- Bruce (age 24)
Boise

I’ll answer briefly, but you can find more detailed answers in this site with our ’search’ feature. As the electron squashes into a smaller space, the wave has to contain components with shorter wavelengths, which turns out to be identical to higher momenta in quantum mechanics.(This is called the Uncertainty Principle.) Big momenta means big kinetic energy. That means that the energy actually goes up, not down, if the electron collapses in too far. So the collapse only goes to the point where the total energy is minimized- the ordinary ground-state.

Mike W.

(published on 10/22/2007)