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Why do electrons not fall into the nucleus?
The picture of electrons "orbiting" the nucleus like planets around the sun remains an enduring one, not only in popular images of the atom but also in the minds of many of us who know …
If you had a magic camera that could take a sequence of pictures of the electron in the 1s orbital of a hydrogen atom, and could combine the resulting dots in a single image, you would see something like this. There is still one thing wrong with this picture; according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle(a better term would be "indeterminacy"), a particle as tiny as the electron cannot be regarded as having either a definite location or momentum. What we are forgetting here is that as we move out from the nucleus, the number of these small volume elements situated along any radius increases very rapidly with \(r\), going up by a factor of \(4πr^2\).
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