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3 Wonders of the Universe, explained
From Quarks to Cosmos
1. The Atom Doesn’t Look like this:
Whenever someone thinks of atoms, they think of tiny little balls like the one in the image. They think of the nucleus as a solid point at the center with electrons as further smaller balls revolving around it. We think of an atom as a micro solar system.
Well, that is the wrong depiction of an atom. Atoms do not look like this and they are not tiny solid balls. When a physicist talks about atoms, he talks about the clouds of probabilities, volumes of space where there is a possibility that energy might manifest itself here as matter. That is how electrons and their orbits really look like in reality. Scientists call this mathematical model of the micro-world a “wave function”.
A wave function is the cloud of probability that an electron might exist here. It doesn’t exist as a solid point. Sometimes, just one electron can occupy the whole space around the nucleus as a spherical cloud of probability. Scientists call these probability clouds, “Orbitals”. They can be of any shape.
