Short on ideas and needing a break, I decided to work on some graphic design pieces. The bad news: no real comic. Good news: I accidentally came up with my favorite logo ever (some of you have already noticed that I changed the banner). Let me tell you, when I flipped that Neon upside down, I thought I was the cleverest guy on Earth. Combine that with my Russell’s Teapot atom and you have pure gold. Right?
“Bwut Maki, it’s the Bohr model, snyarf!”
See what you sound like when you complain about that? You sound like that thing from Thundercats. The Rutherford-Bohr model, first described by Niels Bohr in 1913, is the classic image of an atom we’ve all seen before: A nucleus (+) surrounded by electrons (-) in set orbits. But with the advancement of quantum mechanics, it has since been been discarded. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle tells us that we can never know both the position and speed of subatomic particles at the same time, and Bohr’s model gives the impression that we know both the energy level and position of each electron on an atom. But honestly, who wants to draw a super-positional electron cloud? Alright, sometimes the cloud model can be kind of neat looking, but we’re not at the point where I can draw fuzzy space binkies and have them recognized as electron orbitals.
Perhaps I am doing a disservice by not properly informing you about the correct portrayal of an atom (I sort of just did up there), but I think the Bohr model is valid for the purposes of presenting the learner with a simple diagram of the atom, free from all the Heisenberg head scratching. It’s also pretty damn cool looking as a symbol. Science writer Jennifer Ouellette of Cocktail Party Physics agrees with the educational role of the Bohr model, and how y’all need to stop dissing it.
See? I managed to insert some learn in there. At any rate, expect to see some event announcements here and new prints and shirts over in the Sci-ence Swag store in the near future. I’ve been lax in mining comics for merch content lately. As always, if you have a particular image you want to see on a shirt, print, or commemorative plate (they have them!!) let me know in the comments.
See you all Friday for something more exciting than a commemorative plate, I hope.
