GEMINI 4 HYDROGEN · STANDALONE INSTRUMENT
The Balmer Chamber
Hydrogen has one proton and one electron, yet its spectrum is one of the sharpest fingerprints in the universe. Every line comes from subtracting two inverse squares—1/n₁² − 1/n₂². You do not need a picture in your head to explore it: click any jump, hear the exact ratio as a tone, or slide Doppler redshift to see how an entire star shifts as one coherent system.
Balmer series · Visible (397–656 nm) — Drops to n = 2. The four famous visible lines of hydrogen—crimson, cyan, blue-violet, deep violet.
| Line | Fraction | Energy | Observed λ |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5/36 | 1.89 eV | 656.1 nm | |
| 3/16 | 2.55 eV | 486.0 nm | |
| 21/100 | 2.86 eV | 433.9 nm | |
| 2/9 | 3.02 eV | 410.1 nm | |
| 45/196 | 3.12 eV | 396.9 nm |
Notice how every transition in the table scales together when you drag z: astronomers do not need to see a star up close to know how fast it is moving—they just measure how far the whole integer-ratio ladder has slid.