Physicists have for the first time built an accurate model of part of the solar system inside a single atom of potassium.
An international team, led by Rice University, has showed in a laboratory experiment that it could cause an electron in an atom to orbit the nucleus in precisely the same way that Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids orbit the sun.
The findings uphold a prediction made in 1920 by famed Danish physicist Niels Bohr about the relationship between the then-new science of quantum mechanics and Isaac Newton’s tried -and-true laws of motion.
“Bohr predicted that quantum mechanical descriptions of the physical world would, for systems of sufficient size, match the classical descriptions provided by Newtonian mechanics,” said team leader Barry Dunning. He added: “Bohr also described the conditions under which this correspondence could be observed.”