Quantum Nuclear Physics

A Possible Alternative

  • Physicists were trying to figure out basic facts regarding atomic structure during the 1920s and 1930s. In general, they made amazingly good assumptions and conclusions, and the knowledge base grew rapidly.
  • But given the fact that so little was actually known about any of the related subjects, and the astoundingly small size of atoms, it is natural that they made some mistakes. (The size of atoms is suggested by the fact that if 100,000,000 atoms could be somehow lined up in a row, that row would not even be as long as the WIDTH of your little finger!) TWO of those mistakes they made in the 1920s and `1930s have caused misunderstandings which still haunt modern Nuclear Physics. Actually, their incorrect understanding of those wrong assumptions was actually the entire basis for the beginning of what came to be called Quantum Dynamics! Along with an earlier incorrect assumption, the field of Nuclear Physics has been a lot more complicated than it ever needed to be!
  • One of the two bad assumptions was related to the observed FACT that we only ever are aware of electrons which have very specific orbits, that is, kinetic energy. It was incorrectly assumed that this was due to a QUANTUM characteristic of electron behaviors in atoms, where the electrons COULD ONLY BE in certain orbits. All other possible orbits were assumed to be Excluded! (Entirely because they were never SEEN!)
Those Researchers (and all that have followed them) had overlooked how rapidly that electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom. The KNEW the information but then overlooked its significance! It was already well known that electrons orbit in atoms at speeds that are a substantial fraction of the speed of light! At such speeds, the time needed to travel the tiny circumference of an orbit is incredibly short. For example, the electron in every Hydrogen atom revolves around their nuclei several billion times every second. Why is this important? Because the detectors that science has are all rather SLOW! IF a detector captures an image of an atom AFTER some experiment has altered the atom, it may be 0.001 second after the alteration before we capture an image. That means that the electron of interest has completed many millions of orbits BEFORE we are ever aware of anything!

THIS is important because (in a Classical description) the radius of the electron orbits CAN and ARE very slowly altered, due to an effect of gyroscopic precessional motion. IF we could watch individual orbits, we would not be able to detect the tiny alteration of the electron's semi=major orbital axis. But after millions of orbits, such slow and methodical changes DO have observable effects. In fact, BY THE TIME we can detect anything, the electrons ARE ALREADY in their most stable orbits. Since we have what I call SLOW EYES, we have never detected any electrons which have had any other orbits than the ones we know to be most stable. Specifically, if we were to TOSS AN EXTRA ELECTRON into the vicinity of an ionized Hydrogen atom, with NO specific preferred orbit or angular inclination, within an incredibly short interval of time, we would see that electron in an orbit that we know to be stable.

In other words, if we had FASTER EYES, we would see TRANSITIONS over those millions of orbits to result in stable orbits, NO MATTER WHAT conditions the electron had when it entered the atom.

THIS is quite different from the ASSUMPTION that has always been blindly applied and accepted. An experiment is done to disrupt the electron(s) in an atom. Then the ASSUMPTION is that the electron (somehow) is suddenly and instantly in a stable orbit in that atom. THAT assumption is amazingly poor! With this realization of our SLOW EYES and the recognition that electron orbits can be and are SLOWLY altered due to gyroscopic precessional effects, we NOW have a much clearer understanding of how and why electrons can always seem to have ONLY stable orbits!

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When a Sodium atom combines with a Chlorine atom to form a salt molecule, the electron which gets transferred from being around the Chlorine atom to now being around the Sodium atom, is NOT smart enough to know how much "quantum" energy the new atom will expect of it! IF it had any previous knowledge of expected energy levels in the Chlorine atom (to then enter into ONLY an allowed Quantum energy state), all the rules changed when the electron now has to participate in the Sodium atom. It is clearly NECESSARY for the energy state of the electron to have to be ALTERED in order to now seem to comply with the DIFFERENT Quantum energy states of the new atom. THIS current insight provides an explanation for that process.

  • The Other wrong assumption which was made by those early Physicists is related to a known (macroscopic) effect of charged objects moving in a circular orbits (which the negatively-charged electrons clearly do in the process of orbiting the nucleus. The bad assumption was in applying the MACROSCOPIC interpretation to the sub-microscopic realm of an atom. But once they made that assumption, then the Classical Model of the atom would clearly be impossible, as the continually accelerating electron would necessarily radiate energy away, thereby losing kinetic energy and circling inward toward the nucleus where it would be absorbed within a second. THAT argument IS rather compelling, if it were true, and since it was ASSUMED to be true, it essentially FORCED a variety of attempts to try to eliminate this obvious problem. Quantum Dynamics became extremely popular, due to a vagueness in its description! Rather than describing the energy of electrons as being KINETIC energy of orbital motion, Quantum instead chose to refer to an indefinite CLOUD in which the electron must be! This actually does NOT solve the issue of radiation being emitted, but instead muddles the issue into a more complex idea where the energy content of an electron is defined as undefined! The arguments always therefore refer to PROBABILITIES regarding WHERE an electron might be, while entirely neglecting any consideration of the ENERGY in that electron!

    This approach forces quite a few necessary conclusions which are illogical! For example, IF whatever it is that represents the electron is NOT orbiting, then there could be no orbital dynamics to maintain an orbit! The negatively-charged electron would clearly and logically immediately head directly for the nucleus, and the atom would cease to exist as an atom! If there is a CLOUD OF ENERGY which is revolving around the nucleus, in order to provide the kinetic energy of orbital motion, then the fact that Einstein taught us that a revolving cloud of energy IS representable by an OBJECT (mass-energy equivalence) which we would then call an electron, and we would again face the macroscopic assumption of continuously radiation energy from every electron.

    THIS assumption has been adopted so absolutely, that ALL of the other Laws of Physics have been abandoned in trying to use Quantum Physics to describe the atom. Amusingly, the fact that the energy content was overlooked in first devising this Quantum approach, even means that this Quantum approach does not actually even resolve the issue in Classical Mechanics which it claimed to solve!

    The resolution of this issue, within Classical Mechanics, is due to that equivalence of mass and energy, per Einstein. Yes, the curved page of orbital motion DOES require acceleration, and that DOES then produce a bundle of energy which might become radiated away. However, the precessional effects necessarily CREATE kinetic motion of the precessional motion, and this effect is such that it ABSORBS exactly the amount of radiation which would get produced (by our macroscopic laws).

    The result of this is that the orbiting electron DOES produce a specific amount of radiation energy, but it then always re-absorbs that radiation energy such that no net radiation ever occurs or is ever detected.

  • There is also an alternative description which was even available to those Physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. Einstein had already taught the world that energy and mass are interchangeable and indistinguishable. Everyone already accepted that photons sometimes showed evidence of being particles (mass) (such as in the Photoelectric Effect) and at other times showed evidence of being waves (energy). The point here is that they SHOULD HAVE realized that electrons are ALSO sometimes particles and sometimes energy! So in any experiment that might have confronted a macroscopic-style issue, the electron might simply have then been behaving as energy, where no generation of radiation would have been involved. So, those early Physicists SHOULD HAVE immediately dismissed the concern of a curved-path orbiting electron having to radiate energy away, and simply treated the electrons then as pure energy!

    This description MIGHT require that electron "orbits" are actually SEGMENTED ORBITS. During a STRAIGHT portion of the orbit, no radiation would be produced, and such radiation would only be produced at the vertices of the segmented orbit. Again, the radiation that is then created is immediately re-absorbed to counter the energy effects of kinetic energy for precessional motion.


Around the 1920s, Physicists began developing the concepts of Quantum Physics. This field was quickly and nearly universally adopted by the Physics community, and modern Physics is virtually entirely based on Quantum concepts.

It may be that an original incorrect assumption was made, on which all Quantum Physics relies! There might be little actual validity in even the basic concepts of Quantum Physics, as the following reasoning seems to indicate.

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This is not to say that Quantum Physics has not been helpful in building understandings on many phenomena. Or that any of the results or the predictions due to Quantum Physics had been wrong, because most were certainly correct. It is to say that Quantum Physics concepts might have been a provisional explanation, which might be replaced by a more robust explanation at some time. This presentation is meant to indicate a very likely direction that that better set of descriptions might lie.

The premise here is that three separate simple concepts might be joined to form such a better description, one from Nuclear Physics, one from Astrophysics and Astronomy, and one from Mechanical Engineering. It is suggested to contemplate these points:

Whether one considers atomic structure as being traditional or in quantum terms, the velocities involved are extremely high and the distances are extremely small. In traditional terms, this results in electrons orbiting the nucleus many billions of times every second. For the moment, I ask that you momentarily forget the Pauli Exclusion Principle and the other Quantum-related concepts, and just see the electrons as initially orbiting somewhat randomly. A premise will be suggested that very subtle and slow perturbations might occur, which, over millions and billions of orbits, might result in the strict orbital limitations that we observe.

In the Solar System, there are a number of obvious patterns that exist. Asteroids orbit the Sun over a distributed range of distances from the Sun EXCEPT at those distances where the asteroids would have orbital periods which were simple fractions of the orbital period of the planet Jupiter. Saturn and several other planets have sets of rings which have the same characteristics, having gaps at distances which correspond to orbital periods that are simple fractions of one or another massive moon. The four Galilean moons of Jupiter have orbital periods which are close to but not exactly in the ratio of 1:2:4:8. Jupiter and Saturn have orbital periods which are described as the "Long Inequality" of being very close to but not exactly in the ratio of 2:5. Early in modern astronomy, an interesting relationship called Bode's Law was noticed regarding the distances of the planets from the Sun.

The important consideration for this discussion is that, whatever the mechanism which created these apparently stable or meta-stable relationships, they developed over long periods of time. More accurately, over thousands or even millions of orbits. Within the probably five billion year lifetime of the Solar System, an interval of twelve million years for a million revolutions of the planet Jupiter is but an instant. If a snapshot, or a frame of a movie, of the Solar System was taken every twelve million years, and if some subtle mechanism caused such alignments of the Galilean moons and all the rest, in one frame there might appear relatively random motion of planets and satellites, while in the next frame, the orderly motion we now witness would be seen.

Note that with such a camera or movie, we would only see an apparent "instantaneous" transition into an organized state. If that was our only evidence, we might easily conclude that there is some unseen Quantum principle at work which disallowed planets or satellites from being in orbits other than the stable ones we would see appear. Since we have a much broader collection of data regarding gravitation and astronomy, we would easily see that such a conclusion was incorrect. The error of our conclusion would be due to the very long time intervals between views we would be observing.

Combining these two concepts seems to imply that our views on atomic behavior suffer from similar long intervals. No matter how quickly we try to observe an atom after some experiment that alters or disrupts one or more electrons' orbits, it is always true that many millions of orbits occurred during that interval before the observation. If a phenomenon resembling that which somehow causes Solar System patterns exists, then we will ALWAYS see nice organized electron orbitals and shells and the rest.

The implication here is that such "allowed" orbits as we observe may not be due to any Quantum effects after all. The observed situations might just be a natural result of some slow-acting phenomenon, acting over millions and billions of orbits.

In Mechanical Engineering, there is a field of "Forced Vibration" which developed to analyze unexpected destruction of some rotating machinery, certain bridges such as the Tacoma Narrows, certain tall smokestacks and towers, and assorted other mechanical creations. Every such object has "natural frequencies" and harmonics of them. If a disturbing force happens to have its own natural frequency (and harmonics), then the equations of Forced Vibration analysis can be used to calculate the effects. If the two frequencies are identical, or related by simple fractions such that harmonics would become prominent, machinery almost invariably immediately fails due to extreme forces that occur. However, when frequencies are slowly brought close but not exactly to such a simple fractions, a second-order effect can occur which provides a meta-stability. Equally importantly, there is a very small effect which modifies the frequency relationship.

In astronomical applications, (for simplicity, temporarily assuming circular orbits), the distance between Jupiter and an asteroid is relatively close to being a sinusoidal function, with the period being the synodic period which applies. The fact that the actual distance is slightly non-sinusoidal, in combination with orbits that are not precisely circular or co-planar, enables Forced Vibration effects to occur to the asteroid. All of the orbital elements of the asteroid can be affected. The orbital period can be around ten minutes different from what it would be if Jupiter were not present. In most situations, the orbital eccentricity tends to become less and so does the orbital inclination. These are all rather small second-order effects, but after many thousands of orbits, the affected object tends to have an orbit that is nearly circular and nearly co-planar with Jupiter or whatever the gravitational source of the forcing vibration.

If and when the affected object gets into an orbit that has a period which is an exact fraction of the perturbing source, the magnification effect of Forced Vibration greatly increases the perturbative force and its effects. This eliminates the perturbed object remaining in that situation for any time, but it can definitely pass through such a distance.

The result of these two effects, a second-order forced-vibration effect TOWARD such a situation, along with the extreme aversion due to the magnification effect exactly at such synchronicity, creates two meta-stable available orbits. One is just outside and the other inside the unstable exact commensurable period orbit. This then provides a meta-stable relationship between orbital periods of the perturbing and the perturbed object.

These Astrophysics considerations were first developed in August 2001, and published on the Internet on December 10, 2001 in two web-page presentations, at:
http://mb-soft.com/public/gravres.html
http://mb-soft.com/public/gravitat.html

The astronomical description was repeated here because it seems most easily conceptualized. However, the identical logic would apply regarding atomic electron orbits. Gravitation is an attractive inverse square relationship. The electrostatic attraction between the negatively charged electron and the positively charged nucleus is also an attractive inverse square relationship. If such resonance and forced vibration effects occur after millions of orbits in gravitational systems, and the Solar System contains numerous evidence that they do, then the same resonance and forced vibration effect seem likely regarding electron orbits.

This appears to result in a very simple and obvious explanation of why we only observe very specific orbits for electrons, without having to rely on "Exclusion Principles" or other arguments that do not seem to have reliable theoretical foundations.

This premise makes several predictions regarding nuclear structure by consequence. The most prominent is that each "final orbit" which we might observe, should really be a pair of closely-spaced meta-stable orbits. A specific electron might easily transition back and forth between the two (possibly to momentary perturbations by other electrons) and so ALL observed spectral lines should be extremely close doubles. It is my understanding that this is being empirically found in many cases. This premise suggests that it is an unavoidable consequence that every spectral line would have to be doubled in this way.

There would appear to be predictions regarding the tendency toward circular orbits and co-planar orbits. There seem to be many implications of such effects, particularly regarding electrical and magnetic behavior of some or all elements.

Further study would have to be made regarding why and when a photon might be emitted or absorbed. It may be important to determine just how many orbits are actually necessary for the meta-stabilities to develop. If billions of orbits are necessary, then it might be very difficult to explain why a photon was emitted at a specific moment. However, if only thousands of orbits are necessary, then a disrupted electron, or a new electron addition (by ionization) would be able to transition into a meta-stable orbit in an extremely short interval, possibly short enough to explain how/why all the energy released by that (multi-orbit) transition might be able to become bundled in one photon.

This presentation was first placed on the Internet in January 2004.

The basic concept regarding nuclear implications of the Forced Vibration phenomenon was developed in August 2001 and published in December 2001 on the Internet.

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C Johnson, Theoretical Physicist, Physics Degree from Univ of Chicago