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
>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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