Edmund Stoner and the Bohr atom

The 100th anniversary of the Bohr atom this year is an opportune time to call attention to a little known paper that Edmund Stoner, then a student of Ernest Rutherford and Ralph Fowler at Cambridge University, wrote in 1924. Called “The distribution of electrons among atomic levels,” ¹ it was the first paper to give a correct formulation of the Bohr atom for many electrons.

In Arnold Sommerfeld’s preface to the fourth edition of his Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines, the author gave special mention to einen grossen Fortschritt (a great advancement) brought about by Stoner’s analysis. As a result, Stoner’s paper came to the attention of Wolfgang Pauli and was of great value to his formulation of the exclusion principle in quantum physics. ² Subsequently, Stoner applied the exclusion principle to calculate the maximum mass of white dwarfs a year before Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who generally is given credit for the discovery (reference ; see also Physics Today, July 2011, page 8 ).