Question, for a thing I’m writing:
When you picture an atom, what does it look like?
[please include where/when you learned that picture if it’s something you got from school/higher education]
When you picture an atom, what does it look like?
[please include where/when you learned that picture if it’s something you got from school/higher education]
Comments
* I should be they are tiny cabbages and I like cabbage.
Now I've watched a lot of modern particle physics stuff on YouTube recently, so I see it more as a fuzzy cloud of probability.
An image probably shaped by British New Wave SF.
But I also have an image of a tiny, flickering, glowing cotton ball - possibly shaped by post-college reading of lots of science magazines around the LHC/Higgs boson era.
At some point in the 00s I started picturing a cloud of electrons surrounding that nucleus.
Electrons are weird.
This would have been high school chemistry class - I was 15? 16?
But yeah, clouds of probability. Prob. in high school, but may not have learned it in actual physics class, which featured the Bohr model cuz we didn't have calculus yet.
Then I start just imagining points of lights, because that’s how they look in cold atom optical lattice experiments :)
(see: https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.04178)
If I concentrate I can imagine orbitals, but that's a fully separate mental image.
i love it.
https://youtu.be/khD8fvpqKYI?si=V9VMdCh2hTIMCSQ8&t=218
Later we would see the 'shells' / 'onion' pics
No idea, on our 5th book from Brian Greene and contemplating how thoughts die when particle coalescence stops in far future (sad face).
But yeah, perfect circles and stuff
I know from later education it's much more complex but this is my first thought.
Based on 1970’s CA public education.
If I think again, I get the "sphere inside a spherical cloud" second model.
And obviously an undergrad in physics.
Atoms are represented by a Spirograph
Even though I knew (very little) about quantum mechanics that's what stuck with me.
Mostly from school when I was 15/16 I think?
I'm Italian btw
(I know they don't actually "look" like that, these days)
The nucleus I can point to the models of balls of neutrons and protons, but I've stopped trying to visualize the nucleus. Too many other things there.
If something heavier/more shelled/more short-lived it’s more exciting. Makes a sound. My PHYS250 class was as near as I ever got to chemistry after HS, so it’s kinda abstract. Filled shells of spin-matched wavicles, and then …probably… more Psi |x(t)> stuff.
Mostly empty space, with something semi-solid inside.
Just based on the past few years of learning that it's not a solar system, as we were taught in the 1970s.
This and the particular labels are probably coming from undergrad minerology/petrology classes pictures of mineral structures.
(Also there's 'freeze frame' electrons vs. 'any other speed' electrons which are just a solid blurr)
clump of ball (protons, neutrons) in the middle, electrons orbiting around those. (not to scale, but his image)
Like a solar system, but orbits in many different planes.
Probably a school text book.
Think it was my last year of HS Chem
I probably have the nucleus wrong.
Distinctly remember seeing Powers of Ten on actual film (16mm?) maybe in high school in the early 90s.
https://flashbak.com/our-friend-the-atom-the-1956-disney-book-that-made-you-love-the-bomb-38741/
They convey the abstract concepts of atomic structure in a symbolic way that is pleasing to me.
They remind me of old kabbalistic and alchemical diagrams like these. I mean, atoms don't really *look* like anything, they're practically metaphysical 😁
I know it's a very outdated, simplistic model, but that's what I see first if I just think "atom" without further context
Oh wait that's my love life
1. Indivisible piece of matter (sphere) at primary school
2. Bohr model (high school)
3. Wavefunctions (uni)
4. How to pack spheres to make stuff (cond mat)
So a tennis ball with its internal void, fuzzy surface, & a oriented surface pattern works
That mental image would have come from Mrs. Blackburn's lessons in AP Chemistry around 1994ish.
I remember realizing '50s style orbits was wrong in that class.
This is from high school chemistry.
In my life i do not need correct scale, knowing the subatomic particles, or accuracy, just representation
As an AMO physicist, I may admittedly not be particularly representative
If you were to ask me about orbitals, that would change the picture, because of my chemistry training.
Up to a high school level thsi is a good representation of an atom (see first image).
However if you want a more accurate description then it would have to understand that electrons are a bit more complicated (1/3)
In quantum mechanics electron's behaviour is described by the wavefunction. This essentially gives us the probability of the electron to be in a region/orbital around the nucleus. (2/3)
I learned this during my undergraduate in theoretical physics although in they teach this in some schools. I believe its a funny way to look at it and very weird. (3/3)
Wasn't until later (college modern physics?) that I understood it isn't individual particles whirling around making those shapes, but rather complex waveforms
At the time I had just seen the thing with the dots and three ellipses.
Chemistry in 11th grade
I had a very good physics teacher who taught us about uncertainty.
I learned it through pop culture more than school I think like cartoons/educational shows but also in school in like middle school
I’m not sure particularly where I picked this up
My middle school (8th grade) chemistry teacher gave them to him as I could not be trusted with permanent markers.
For my 15yo, from school (probably middle school): a ball of spherical protons and neutrons stuck together with atoms zinging around it
Overall, it's mostly a mishmash of undergrad chemistry courses and my own attempts, as a math person, to make visual sense of 3D probability distributions.