Almost immediately after Bohr arrived in Manchester, he made a very important discovery: he wasn’t quite cut out for laboratory work. It was much better for him (and the future of physics) to be seated at a desk and tasked with deriving new formulas. Rutherford agreed, and before long Bohr began a fateful quest to understand, and overcome, the deficiencies of Rutherford’s nuclear atom.
He succeeded, and he did so by taking a page out of Planck’s and Einstein’s. He quantized the atom. Truth be told, he really only “semi-quantized” the atom because he assumed that in some ways it behaved classically while other ways it exhibited quantum behavior. But the bottom line is he came up with a model that was quite capable of explaining almost every observation of the hydrogen atom at that time.
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