Explaining the Hydrogen Nucleus

[Kirill Danilov]

Unless the 15-year old already has the comprehensive notion of wave-particle duality or the uncertainty principle, the content of such an explanation would be meaningless because it would default to misinterpreting the situation as the familiar orbital motion of classical mechanics (or the Bohr model) without learning anything new.

The idea of an observer being located on the nucleus and constantly interrogating the -momentum- of the electron, then procuring a time-average of such an interrogation only has a unique meaning distinct from orbital motion if the uncertainty principle is considered, as that is the source of the spherical, spatial probability amplitude wavefunction (in effect, QED proscribes such an interrogation as the Coulomb force between proton and electron is mediated by photon scattering interactions). Provided the 1s electron is never excited to any state, it simply smears into the radial distribution given by the 1s electron and appears to form densest on a shell given by the Bohr radius, which would appear constant in time (which by the way also has a dispersion for the atom, since the energy is well-defined).

Explaining this to a child that understands the electron diffraction thought experiment is trivial, explaining it to one that does not is impossible.

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