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?
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.
Latest Answers