Atom 1. The Clash of Titans (19 of 30)

Atom

I remember lecturing here a few years back and I know that Niels Bohr himself designed some of the machinery that raised and lowered blackboards.
There's an incredible series of boards, one underneath the other, of boards filled with his formulae so that he wouldn't ever need to rub out any of his equations.
It sort of goes on and on.
Bohr's reputation for radical and unconventional ideas made Copenhagen a magnet for young, ambitious physicists.

They were keen to make their mark and be a part of Bohr's innovative new science, which came to be known as quantum mechanics.
In 1924, in defiance of Einstein and De Broglie's traditional explanation of the atom, the radicals revealed a new theory, based on Bohr's quantum jumps.
It was to be their most ambitious and most controversial idea yet.
It was first developed by Wolfgang Pauli, one of Bohr's rising stars.
Pauli took Bohr's bizarre "quantum jumps" idea and turned it into one of the most important concepts in the whole of science.
And I don't say that lightly.
Pauli's idea goes by the uninspiring title of the Exclusion Principle.
But I think a better title would be "God's best-kept secret" because it explains the vast variety of Creation.
The question Pauli's idea tried to answer was this.
Every atom is made of the same simple components.
So why do they appear to us in so many different guises?
In such a rich variety of colours, textures and chemical properties?
For instance, gold and mercury.
Two very different elements.