What an Atom Really Looks Like

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átomo.jpeg
átomo.jpeg

For a long time, atoms have been graphically represented with a figure that quickly comes to mind, that sphere surrounded by small orbiting elements.

Over the years, the model was updated based on scientific foundations, making its graphical representation more complex with new information collected through research. In a recently published video, the structure of some atoms was recreated at the bottom of the theory.

3D models that accurately represent certain atoms

Henry Reich, creator of the YouTube channel Minute Physics, shared through a video the actual appearance of atoms through the model of Bohm’s interpretation, to visualize the trajectories and wave functions of hydrogen orbitals, rendered in 3D using a custom python code in Blender.

At the beginning of the video, Reich states that the orbital structure of atoms has been a source of great frustration, since the most basic diagrams, despite being friendly, are considered vague and imprecise.

Although there are other designs, presented as a context in the video, in the shape of clouds, balloons or threads, they are a little closer to theory, but they do not provide enough information to analyze their structure or operation.

The scientific popularizer raises the need for a more finished graphic model of the atoms, so that important details such as the location of the electrons, the speed of their orbit, their energy capacity and even a scale of measurements that represent their size.

And although he acknowledges that the task is not easy, he affirms that “There is a way of thinking about wave-particle duality in which you imagine the wave function as a pile of water and the particle as a speck of dust in that water; the particle is guided mainly by where the water goes (and the water is guided by the equations that determine how the water behaves depending on its circumstances) ”. If the mathematical approach of that idea is extrapolated to atomic orbitals and then rendered in 3D, a visual representation like the one in the image attached to this note can be obtained. The video provides more examples.

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In these designs it is possible to review the structure of an atom in detail, with the possibility of identifying patterns in the orbitals. The precision is not so fine as to affirm that the representation is absolutely correct, since the dots that appear do not each represent a separate electron, but rather that the entire mass represents the wave function of a single electron. The individual points mark all the places where an electron could be, which implies that a higher density of points represents a greater probability that the electron is there.

Among the precisions shared by Reich to understand the shared graphs, he also points out that electrons with more energy are more likely to be located far from the nucleus, a condition that justifies that orbitals with higher energy are larger.

Science is constantly advancing. From the time of Democritus (450 BC), the idea of ​​the atom as an indivisible unit of matter was raised. Subatomic particles became known later, which can still be decomposed into other smaller units. Now, the image we have of these particles is beginning to be considered in another way, seeking to get closer and closer to a precise representation.