Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2022
The Bohr formulation—the original one—is now largely a matter of history. The usual career of a theory was its fate. It explained much, but it failed at the first signs of complication, even for the simplest molecules as hydrogen and helium. Some results were either only approximate in a loose or incomplete fashion, e.g. in the application of the correspondence principle to intensities, the only reliable predictions being only for an absence of certain lines, or they quite disagreed with experiment, e.g. in the case of the hydrogen molecule and the hydrogen molecule ion, the normal and excited states of helium, the anomalous Zeeman effect, the Ramsauer effect (the phenomenon of the deflection of electrons at low speeds being less than at higher speeds in atomic collisions), and in the treatment of problems where more than one electron was involved. In the last mentioned cases the perturbation method, so successful in solving “many-body” problems in celestial mechanics, failed completely because systems of several electrons, possessing frequencies of the order of light waves, cannot interact classically. A bit of much forced pragmatism was practiced in treating the many electron atom as a variation of the hydrogen atom. Besides, there were technical oddities, like ½ quantum numbers, and impenetrated anologies between visible and X-ray spectra.
1. In this case a semi-empirical solution was obtained by the use of 4 quantum numbers (incorporating the idea of electron spin) but not by solving a Hamilton-Jacobi partial differential equation.
2. The technical argument cannot be given here. Schroedinger's stating of the total energy in Hamiltonian form with the potential energy entering involves implicitly an n-atomic model.