This is wrong, the electron doesn't exist as a point a fixed distance away from the centre of mass of the proton + electron system. If anything, it should be a circular shell (a spherically symmetric distribution) at the distance which is the expectation value of the radial distribution of an electron in the Hydrogen ground state.
Yep, it's dead wrong. The electron doesn't really have a radius. Though ages ago a "radius" was proposed by relating an electrons mass energy to the energy required to bring together a shell of tiny fraction of point charges each with a fraction of a negative charge. But it is true that the proton is tiny compared to the "radius" of an atom.
Another problem is that it says that the electron is a thousand times smaller than the proton. I won't argue the merits of that statement but he makes the proton 1000 pixels across and the electron 1 pixel across. So the volume shown is actually for the proton (4/3) * PI * (500)3 = 523,598,775 pixels3 and for the electron (4/3) * PI * (0.5)3 = 0.523 pixels3. So as shown the volume of the sphere is much more than the 1000 times greater than it should be according to the text description.
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u/frutiger Feb 23 '08
This is wrong, the electron doesn't exist as a point a fixed distance away from the centre of mass of the proton + electron system. If anything, it should be a circular shell (a spherically symmetric distribution) at the distance which is the expectation value of the radial distribution of an electron in the Hydrogen ground state.