Tuesday, January 7, 2020

energy - Do we really not know why atoms 'decide' to produce a photon?


I was watching the Cosmos documentary where Neil deGrasse Tyson explained how certain energy photons get absorbed by an atom, which causes the electrons of that atom to climb into a higher energy state.


He then says that an atom produces a photon when those electrons drop to a lower energy state, but that we don't know why this happens. I understood that as 'we don't know what triggers this to happen'.


Is that true? And if so, are there any feasible theories that explain this phenomenon?




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classical mechanics - Moment of a force about a given axis (Torque) - Scalar or vectorial?

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