[Physics] Why don’t electrons fall or collapse around atom when an object accelerates rapidly

atomic-physicsatomselectronsmaterial-sciencequantum mechanics

In laws of motion, everything has an equal and opposite reaction, and it applies to all matters in the reality.

If the earth stops moving suddenly just for one second, then everything on earth will be thrown out into space. But sudden rapid movement or sudden stop of motion does not cause the electrons to lose control around the nucleus or atom. Why? (For example: putting the brakes on suddenly in a car while traveling around the speed of $180$ km/h, creates massive momentum transfer and that momentum does not affect the electron's path of the car or the person sitting inside the car?) Is it because of the strength of the attraction between electron and nucleus?

NOTE: Thanks for the edit and I understand the transfer of momentum energy is transferred to the whole system, not just some part but still the momentum is high for an electron when 180 km/h suddenly stops, The whole atomic field will receive the massive vibrations caused by momentum and still the path of the electron is not disturbed in atomic level ? and is that because of the attraction between electrons and the nucleus?

Best Answer

At first, as others have said,- you transfer car momentum to a whole atom system, not just to some part of it,- like electrons, nucleus, etc.

Second,- an electron is not something you can easily mess around. If you look at the semi-classical Bohr atom model, an electron goes with a tangential speed around the nucleus defined by: $$ v={\sqrt {\frac {Zk_{\mathrm {e} }e^{2}}{m_{\mathrm {e} }r}}}. $$

So for example the electron in a hydrogen atom at the ground level flies with amazing $\approx 2000 ~\text{km/s}$ speed. That's about $1\%$ of light-speed! If converted to an electron centripetal acceleration notion, gives about $10^{21}\text {g}$. Thus an atom's electrodynamical system is a very stable thing.

That said, you can push an electron out of an atom. But for doing that you need some different approach, like scattering the hydrogen nucleus with high-speed neutrons in a particle accelerator or just "stretching" a hydrogen atom in a static electric field, so that it would overcome an ionization energy of $13~\text {eV}$, or forcing a hydrogen atom to absorb such an energy photon.