Georgy I Sukhorukov
Georgy I. Sukhorukov | |
|---|---|
| Residence | Bratsk, Russia |
| Nationality | Russian |
| Known for | A classical theory of atomic structure presented as a continuation of the Bohr–Sommerfeld model |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics, atomic structure, spectroscopy |
Georgy I. Sukhorukov (Russian: Георгий Иванович Сухоруков) is a Russian researcher based in Bratsk, Irkutsk Oblast, who together with Edouard G Sukhorukov and Roman G Sukhorukov has developed an alternative, explicitly classical theory of atomic structure. The three authors present their work as a direct continuation of the Bohr–Sommerfeld theory rather than of the quantum mechanics that displaced it, and they test it against the measured ionization potentials and spectral term energies of the elements.
Biography
Little biographical information about Georgy I. Sukhorukov is available in public sources. The contact details published with the authors' 2000 Russian-language article place him in Bratsk (postal code 665709), and give him a contact e-mail address in the domain of Bratsk State Technical University (now Bratsk State University). His co-authors, Edouard Georgievich Sukhorukov and Roman Georgievich Sukhorukov, both carry the patronymic "Georgievich" — that is, "son of Georgy" — and both are likewise resident in Bratsk, which indicates that the three form a father-and-sons research team. No further details of his education, degrees or professional appointments could be verified.
Scientific work
The Sukhorukovs' starting point is a dissatisfaction with the mathematical intractability of the standard quantum-mechanical account of the atom. They observe that the three-dimensional Schrödinger equation cannot be solved in elementary functions even for the hydrogen atom, that for atoms with two or more electrons it cannot be solved even numerically in closed form, and that computing the spectral terms of a single complex atom by approximate methods has required hundreds of hours — or years — of machine time. In their view the historical rejection of the Bohr–Sommerfeld picture was premature: that theory was abandoned because of the difficulties it met in accounting for the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum and for the structure of many-electron atoms, and the Sukhorukovs argue that those particular difficulties can be removed without discarding the planetary model itself.
Their theory therefore retains Rutherford's planetary atom with electrons on definite orbits, and treats it entirely within classical physics. The modification they introduce concerns the propagation of interaction. They take the speed of propagation of interaction to be the speed of light, and hold that the finiteness of that speed is due to the existence of a world medium — an aether. On this view the laws of Newton and Coulomb hold exactly only for bodies at rest with respect to that medium; for bodies in motion the effectiveness of the interaction depends on their speed relative to the medium, according to formulae analogous to those of the Doppler effect in optics and acoustics, and given in a general form for the case in which both interacting bodies are moving. This velocity-dependent correction to the Coulomb interaction is what supplies, in their treatment, the relativistic effects that Sommerfeld had introduced through relativistic mechanics, and it is the element they regard as making the planetary model workable for complex atoms.
The evidential base of the theory is spectroscopic rather than formal. The authors build on the extensive body of measured ionization potentials and of term energies in the optical and X-ray regions, values that are tabulated in the reference literature to eight to ten significant figures. They regard these data as the most reliable available, being the accumulated result of the whole of experimental atomic spectroscopy, and they report that the values computed by the methods derived from their theory agree well with them. The claim is thus one of computational parity or advantage: a classical, closed-form scheme that reproduces the same high-precision atomic data that quantum mechanics obtains only by heavy numerical approximation.
Publications
- Г.И. Сухоруков, Э.Г. Сухоруков, Р.Г. Сухоруков, "Новая теория строения атомов" ("New Theory of Atomic Structure"), Наука и техника (n-t.ru), Bratsk, 22 August 2000. Full text (PDF)
- G.I. Sukhorukov, E.G. Sukhorukov, R.G. Sukhorukov, "New Theory of Atomic Structure", Galilean Electrodynamics vol. 16, no. S2 (Special Issue 2), 2005, pp. 23–26
- Г.И. Сухоруков, Э.Г. Сухоруков, Р.Г. Сухоруков, "Познание реальности методами классической физики" ("Cognition of Reality by the Methods of Classical Physics"), Bratsk
Abstracts
- 2005 - "New Theory of Atomic Structure"
External links
- "Новая теория строения атомов" — Russian-language version of the theory at the Nauka i Tekhnika electronic library
- Galilean Electrodynamics — journal in which the English-language paper appeared