system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why don't electrons crash into the nucleus of an atom?

If electrons are attracted to protons, what keeps them from falling into the atom's nucleus?
gpt
They do basically fall into the nucleus, in a sense. In the lowest energy state of hydrogen there is zero orbital angular momentum: you can't really say that the electron is orbiting at all. In this state there is a nonzero chance to find the electron inside the proton. A classical analog would be the electron perpetually falling though the proton, coming out the other side, then falling back in again... except this is Quantum mechanics and so you've actually got this smeared out wavefunction along that whole path plus smeared along all possible orientations so it's spherically symmetric.

What keeps the electron from being able to be confined to the nucleus is the uncertainty principle: the smaller a volume you try to confine an electron to, the higher it's spread in possible momentum becomes until it has a high probability of escaping. If you try to confine an electron to the region of the nucleus (10^-15 m) then the electrostatic binding energy is like 1 MeV while the uncertainty on the momentum of the electron is like 100 MeV (give or take factors of 2). Clearly the electron will just escape in this situation.