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.
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