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
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.
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