{"id":223840,"date":"2025-10-23T12:11:29","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T17:11:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/hydrogen-atom"},"modified":"2025-10-23T12:11:29","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T17:11:29","slug":"hydrogen-atom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/hydrogen-atom","title":{"rendered":"Hydrogen atom"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/hydrogen-atom2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A <b>hydrogen atom<\/b> is an <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Atom\" title=\"Atom\">atom<\/a> of the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Chemical_element\" title=\"Chemical element\">chemical element<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hydrogen\" title=\"Hydrogen\">hydrogen<\/a>. The <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Electric_charge\" title=\"Electric charge\">electrically<\/a> neutral hydrogen atom contains a single positively charged <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Proton\" title=\"Proton\">proton<\/a> in the nucleus, and a single negatively charged <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Electron\" title=\"Electron\">electron<\/a> bound to the nucleus by the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Coulomb_force\" title=\"Coulomb force\">Coulomb force<\/a>. <b>Atomic hydrogen<\/b> constitutes <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements\" title=\"Abundance of the chemical elements\">about 75%<\/a> of the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Baryon\" title=\"Baryon\">baryonic<\/a> mass of the universe.<sup id= cite_ref-1 class= reference><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hydrogen_atom#cite_note-1\"> [ 1 ]<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<p>In everyday life on Earth, isolated hydrogen atoms (called \u201catomic hydrogen\u201d) are extremely rare. Instead, a hydrogen atom tends to combine with other atoms in compounds, or with another hydrogen atom to form ordinary (<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Diatomic\" title=\"Diatomic\">diatomic<\/a>) hydrogen gas, H<sub>2<\/sub>. \u201cAtomic hydrogen\u201d and \u201chydrogen atom\u201d in ordinary English use have overlapping, yet distinct, meanings. For example, a water molecule contains two hydrogen atoms, but does not contain atomic hydrogen (which would refer to isolated hydrogen atoms).<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Atomic_spectroscopy\" title=\"Atomic spectroscopy\">Atomic spectroscopy<\/a> shows that there is a discrete infinite set of states in which a hydrogen (or any) atom can exist, contrary to the predictions of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Classical_physics\" title=\"Classical physics\">classical physics<\/a>. Attempts to develop a theoretical understanding of the states of the hydrogen atom have been important to the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/History_of_quantum_mechanics\" title=\"History of quantum mechanics\">history of quantum mechanics<\/a>, since all other atoms can be roughly understood by knowing in detail about this simplest atomic structure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A hydrogen atom is an atom of the chemical element hydrogen. The electrically neutral hydrogen atom contains a single positively charged proton in the nucleus, and a single negatively charged electron bound to the nucleus by the Coulomb force. Atomic hydrogen constitutes about 75% of the baryonic mass of the universe. [ 1 ] In [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}