I have gone deep into a rabbit hole and I’m now forgetting everything there is to know. Atoms are a unit of matter with a proton, neutron, and electron. First off, are protons and electrons physical objects, or are they just representing a positive and negative charge? Secondly, when atoms interact with each other via intermolecular forces to form molecules, what is physically interacting with each other?
In: Chemistry
The more complicated answer is protons and neutrons are actual particles. They’re the bits in the center of the atom. Electrons are more difficult to comprehend. The model of the atom that you’ve seen your whole life is not very accurate. The sizes of the particles relative to each other and the distances between them are pretty large compared to size. My favorite visualization is to think of a decent sized football stadium. If you put a single pea on the 50 yard line then the electron cloud would roughly be a sphere about as far as the outer walls of the stadium. The electron cloud is where we start getting into the world of the quantum. There might be as many as 8 electrons in this shell (larger atoms have more shells). But it’s impossible to say where in that sphere any of those electrons really are. It’s more like each one is everywhere all at once. When 2 or more atoms join what is happening is the electron valences are combining. This is due to atoms really wanting to fill those valences, and that takes 8 electrons. They share electrons with other atoms to make this happen.
That is about as simple as I can explain it. I’m sure I got some things wrong, or at least not quite right. And I never said whether or not electrons are actually particles or just tiny electric charges. I believe that electrons are particles, but have very little “weight”. The whole story about how atoms work and their nature is so much more detailed. There are people that have spent entire careers working on trying to figure them out.
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