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 doesn’t really have a shape in the sense we normally mean. A lumpy cloud is probably the closest easy analogy.
You can’t define it’s shape by the boundaries where you can touch it, like we do with macro scale solids, because it doesn’t have any defined boundaries you can touch.
You can’t define it’s shape by what it looks like because it’s so small that we can’t see it with any light our eyes can work with. Extremely high energy particles can “see” it in a sense but they are so powerful that they distort the shape when they interact with the atom.
The particles themselves aren’t the little spheres your old high school marble models suggest…they’re spread out in space like tiny waves with basically a cloud of probability for where they’re likely to be found at a particular time.
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