Rice University physicists have gone to extremes to prove that Isaac Newton’s classical laws of motion can apply in the atomic world: They’ve built an accurate model of part of the solar system inside a single atom of potassium.
In a new paper published this week in Physical Review Letters, Rice’s team and collaborators at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Vienna University of Technology showed they could cause an electron in an atom to orbit the nucleus in precisely the same way that Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids orbit the sun. http://news.rice.edu/2012/01/25/rice-lab-mimics-jupiters-trojan-asteroids-inside-a-single-atom/
