In chemistry and physics class, they visualise them as plastic marbles with sticks to connect them to eachother, but what is the true shape of an atom? It also contains quarks and has spinning electrons and neutrons around it. Is it a cloud? How does atomic matter actually look?
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It’s tough to pin down a defined shape when things get this small. Even an atom is mostly empty space. The nucleus makes up a tiny point in the center. But we don’t know how to pin down the position of an electron with any certainty, ajd it’s not clear that the concept of a “position” actually applies in the way we usually think of it. We can calculate the *orbitals* of electrons -probability graphs showing where an electron is likely to be found- and [some orbitals do look like spheres. Some, however, look very different](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital). The first two images on the Wikipedia page I linked all show some of the possible orbitals for a hydrogen atom. and that’s just one electron buzzing around the nucleus. For other atoms it quickly gets more complex.
We tend to approximate atoms as spheres. It’s not completely correct, but it’s a model we can wrap our heads around while still being close enough for most purposes. And that’s okay, as long as we remain aware that it doesn’t work all the time, and that sometimes we might have to reach for the more complicated stuff.
[Here’s a stop-motion movie made by moving atoms around with a scanning tunneling microscope](https://youtu.be/oSCX78-8-q0?feature=shared). These aren’t the true colors of the atoms: individual atoms don’t have a color, because visible light doesn’t work at scales this small. But it’s one of the closest things we have to what an atom looks like. [This picture from a couple years ago](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2279115-this-is-the-most-detailed-look-at-individual-atoms-ever-captured/) zooms even closer in, but again, remember that these pictures aren’t using light the way our eyes see it.
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