What is the actual shape of an atom?

Question

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?

In: 69

Answer 1

Almost nothing whatsoever.

There are tiny particle-like things whizzing around a center of other tiny particle-like things also whizzing around, but at any scale in which you can reasonably depict it, it’s mostly nothing all the way through.

The analogy for electron/neutron for instance is that if the neutron was a pea in the middle of a stadium, an electron would be whizzing around the outside of the stadium, and would be 1/1000th the size of the pea. Almost the entirely of the “atom” is nothing at all. There’s no real “structure” in that sense. It’s just a handy diagrammatic depiction.

Imagine standing in the middle of the stadium and seeing a pea at your feet and then trying to spot a speck of dust running around the stadium. That’s literally ALL the atom is. Everything else is forces of those things pushing each other (a bit like magnets, but ultra-strong in comparison at this scale… magnets the size of a pea that literally keep that speck of dust orbiting even at that distance and not letting it escape). Take away the stadium and everything else and just leave the pea and the dust-speck, and there’s basically nothing there.

And even the “orbiting” thing is a bit of a misnomer, the particles themselves are not what you think of as particles, and they’re moving at ridiculous speeds so much so that we can’t even tell where they are, but they “look” like they’re orbiting at a given distance (however when it comes to shrinking/growing the atom by adding more electrons, for instance, they almost immediately “jump” to a different orbit with basically almost no “time” where they are between the two states).

And from that we draw cute little diagrams like planets orbiting or spheres, and none of that has any real relevance to the actual structure of the object of an atom itself.

Then you get into the quantum / quark stuff… nobody knows. At that scale things break down and even light doesn’t help us picture anything. You’re talking about things “smaller than light itself”, if you like. We can only imagine.