THIS book is based on a series of lectures delivered by Prof. Richardson at the University of Princeton, and gives a general survey of the electron theory. The book starts with an account of the ...

For millennia, atoms had been phantoms, widely suspected to exist but remaining stubbornly invisible — though not indivisible, as their name (Greek for “uncuttable”) originally implied. By the start ...

There are about a dozen quantities in atomic and nuclear physics that are fundamental to our current understanding of science. One is the speed of light and another is the fine-structure constant, ...

Niels Bohr was one of the foremost scientists of modern physics, best known for his substantial contributions to quantum theory and his Nobel Prize-winning research on the structure of atoms. Born in ...

There’s an idea that suggests all the universe’s electrons are actually one particle forever traveling backwards and forwards in time. It’s a simple, elegant idea that solves some of physics’s biggest ...

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www ...

Résumé of the many-electron problem -- The occupation number representation (second quantization) -- The Hartree-Fock method and the free-electron gas -- Plasma oscillations in a free-electron gas -- ...