- #1
nomadreid
Gold Member
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My question is best explained by a Gedankenexperiment. First we have a hydrogen atom, with the electron not collapsing into the nucleus for the well-known reason of its minimum energy being above that needed to overcome the Coulomb force. Fine. Now replace the proton in the nucleus with a positron. Blip! the electron and positron annihilate. But the Coulomb forces are the same, the electron's energy is still quantised, so why doesn't the same mechanism work?