Do the neutrons, protons, and electrons in atoms have color or texture? The atoms shown in most textbooks are just for basic visual representation but they have to actually look like something right?
In: Physics
Descriptions of what something “looks like,” really boil down to descriptions of how that something interacts with light. And, well, at the scale of single atoms, light itself acts in a very… blurry way. So it’s not entirely clear that there *is* anything for stuff to “look like”, when that stuff is too small to produce any images in light wavelengths we can see. Color and texture are properties which matter only really starts to have in any definite way when it piles up a bit bigger. (eta: well, single atoms can have color. Smaller stuff like electrons not so much.)
Quantum models of atoms represent the electron orbits as soft-edged probability fields, and so far, our observations give no reason to doubt that that’s what’s “really” happening down at that scale. We tend to want to apply our normal sensory experience to try and understand these things – like a particle is just a rubber ball but tinier, and if we shrunk down to a nanometer tall we could see and interact with it like one, and see exactly where it ends and the empty space around it begins.. But this doesn’t appear to be the reality. Physics *itself* doesn’t seem to commit to one definite answer about where the particle ends and the empty space begins. Stuff is just kinda fuzzy.
>but they have to actually look like something right?
They don’t.
In fact, individual atoms *can’t* look like anything. They’re too small.
The smallest thing the human eye is capable of seeing is a blue photon with a 400 nanometer wavelength. Anything smaller than that is utterly invisible. And atoms are over a thousand times smaller than that.
We can still *visualize* things that a smaller than that by using an electron microscope that uses electrons instead of light, but that’s all it is, a visualization. Any colour in it is entirely false.
As for texture, that depends on what sort of texture you’re talking about. A video-game style texture with different colours isn’t possible since the colours are all too large. A physical bump map texture isn’t possible since nothing ever touches subatomic particles (except other subatomic particles in nuclear reactors/detonations).
Protons and neutrons do consist of varying amounts of quarks but… well, when I say varying, that means quarks are constantly being created from nothing and disappearing to the same, so even if you could see them (which you can’t without destroying what you’re looking at) you wouldn’t be able to use that to tell subatomic particles apart.
I know this will not satisfy you, but we have no idea of their color because at the moment we can just see atoms in B&W.
The problem is that in order to “see” something, a photon has to bounce off of it, which we then register and assign color according to the wavelength of the photon.
How this actually works is that the photon hits the outer hull of the atom, vanishes, its energy gets absorbed by an electron, which briefly gets into an excited state, then reverts to the equilibrium state and thereby releases the delta energy in the form of another photon.
So even if you managed to actually hit an atom with a photon, and see the resulting photon, you would only “see” the delta energy of the outer hull electrons. So you wouldn’t see the individual neutrons, protons or electrons, just the generic outline of its hull.
When looking at a macroscopic object, light of all kinds of frequencies hits billions of atoms, a few of them “reflecting” a mix of some wavelengths, which we then perceive as color. In that sense it should be possible to also assign a color to each atom (but not the individual components of that atom), as it can only “reflect” certain wavelengths of light.
> they have to actually look like something right?
When I asked the same question to my physics tutor he said that when things get really small, the rules our meat sensors (eyes, touch receptors, taste, smell, whatever) impose on us no longer apply. It’s why things stop making sense the smaller and smaller we go.
So unfortunately this isn’t the answer anyone likes, but they really don’t need to make sense to us, it’s pretty clear that nature on a macro scale and nature on a micro scale are two different things and unfortunately we are only capable of truly comprehending the macro scale. We resort to mathematics in order to gain understanding of the micro scale but the most we will ever be able to comprehend with our five senses is only as large as technology is able to magnify for us to physically see.
Even then “magnification” technology such as tunnelling electron microscopes don’t truly magnify the image (don’t let language such as “lenses” confuse you, there are no lenses in an electron microscope but that part of the machine operates the same way as a lens), they just use electromagnetic fields in order to create a visualisation based on the voltage or distance of a pointy stick away from the surface you are magnifying
All this while my dumbass actually thought those clumps of balls with rings around them were legit representations of what atoms look like under microscopes.
>but they have to actually look like something right?
It’s very counterintuitive, but not only do they not look like something, they actually *can’t* look like something. On the scale of atoms, we’re in the realm of quantum physics, and the rules that we think of that apply in the normal scales that we’re used to aren’t applicable.
It’s tempting to think of particles as little balls flying around that have properties as larger ball you might encounter in your daily life, but that’s not the case. Particles have mass and charge and other properties that we can measure, but they don’t have shapes or surfaces or colors or even well-defined positions. An electron isn’t a little ball flying around the nucleus of an atom, it exists as as weird fuzzy area of probability.
So in short, the laws of physics that apply on the scale of atoms are different that what we experience in our daily lives. Atoms don’t really have any of the properties that we associate with solid objects that we can see or touch. We can probe atoms to measure properties they do have like mass and charge, but they quite literally do not possess properties that make them solid objects that have shape or color or texture or even a well-defined physical location. They don’t look like anything because they aren’t really even things in that sense (although obviously they are real and have properties that we can measure).
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