Explaining geopolitics to a seven year-old

[a completely inoffensive name]

Actually it gets a bit more complex than that (for people in final years of highschool). The Bohr model works on a quantum mechanical level, so you need to understand first that an electron does not “orbit” itself per se. Rather it is something a bit like light, which behaves both as wave and as particle. The Bohr model merely explains physical properties of the atom, for instance fluorescence.

However it does not work at all well for chemical properties of elements nor for structure of “molecules” or other compounds made up of multiple elements. Then it quickly gets pretty scary because those orbits are now described in terms of partial differential equations which for even simple elements like H2 are a bit more than most people can stomach. But it's that more complex model of an orbit which when applied to multiple electrons gives the impression/appearance of a cloud when graphed in 3d (rather than it actually being a cloud itself).

So to sum up, in highschool Bohr is still correct in physics, and in chemistry you learn about the more complex quantum “configurations” of various electrons which is a different way of saying the same thing as in the Bohr model with the proviso you know a bit (but probably don't fully understand any of it) about those partial differential equations that come to define the conceptually simpler orbits previously taught.

Also: planets do not move in circular orbits around the Sun, due among other things to the interaction with other planets.

Ahh, I stand corrected (as a new freshman entering uni only a month ago).

EDIT: I should say I was only using the circular planetary orbit as an analogy since most pictures of the "Solar system" at a basic level of schooling show every orbit to be essentially circular even though they are indeed not exactly so and are actually either elliptical or a bunch of other possibilities.

Also when I was a Junior in high school I took the general Chemistry course and they took it up to the orbital/cloud diagrams, in my senior year I took the AP Physics course and they used the Bohr model. Perhaps if I took an advance Chemistry course instead of regular I would have gotten the more accurate version.