Stoner, Edmund

Soon after Bohr developed his initial configuration Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich realized the need to characterize the stationary states of the electron in the hydrogen atom by. means of a second quantum number—the so-called angular-momentum quantum number, Bohr immediately applied this discovery to many-electron atoms and in 1922 produced a set of more detailed electronic configurations. In turn, Sommerfeld went on to discover the third or inner, quantum number, thus enabling the British physicist Edmund Stoner to come up with an even more refined set of electronic configurations in 1924. 

Also see discussion of the importance of Edmund C. Stoner s work done in the 1920s relating spectroscopic data and periodic properties, in John Servos, Physical Chemistry from Ostwald to Pauling, 285286. 

Shortly after introducing his second theory of the periodic system, Bohr began to believe that the assumptions on which it was based might be unfounded, but it was not until the work of Pauli a little later that the situation would begin to be clarified. In the meantime, another physicist, Edmund Stoner, was to provide the next missing piece of the puzzle of quantum numbers and the periodic table. 

However, in many instances, the electronic configurations proposed by chemists were superior to those postulated such physicists as Niels Bohr and Edmund Stoner. This is not entirely surprising given the chemist s familiarity with the properties of the elements. Inductive arguments based on macroscopic behavior of elements were often more fruitful than the deductive arguments based on physical principles. Moreover, as described in chapter 7, even physicists routes to electronic configurations were not always as deductive as they were claimed to be by their authors. 

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