An Atomic Apology

I was very mean a while back when I posted a picture of George Michael and titled the post “What does an atom look like?”

Since then literally hundreds of well-meaning people (possibly children!) have come by search to that page, only to find my idiotic post.

Well, I’m here to rectify a few things. The basic answer is, even if you wanted to, you can’t “see” an atom.

An atom is composed of a nucleus, which contains protons and neutrons. This nucleus is surrounded by electrons, which cannot be seen under any circumstances. This is because electrons are never in the same place — they are in ALL places at the same time. Unbelievably, they don’t “move” around the nucleus as we know it, but go from place to place without passing through space — they simply disappear and reappear simultaneously.

Although an atom might be considered “spherical” in a sense, it actually is just a mass kind of like a very fuzzy tennis ball.

One remarkable aspect of an atom is that it is mostly composed of empty space.

It has been compared to a pea in the center of a cathedral, where the pea is the nucleus, and the cathedral is the orbiting electrons. However, in this case, the “pea” weighs orders of magnitude more than the cathedral.

The basic working arrangement of the atom is the molecule. A molecule is simply two or more atoms working together in a more or less stable arrangement: add two atoms of hydrogen to one of oxygen and you have a water molecule.

At sea level, at a temperature of 32 degrees F (freezing point), one cubic centimeter of air (about the size of a sugar cube) outside your window will contain 45,000,000,000,000,000,000 (45 billion billion) molecules.

And it has been suggested that every living human on earth contains at least several billion atoms that were once a part of Genghis Khan, William Shakespeare, Moses, and yes, even Jesus.

But if you really want to “see” what an atom looks like, you might take a look at this image produced by IBM a while back with a scanning electron microscope in which they purportedly managed to spell the letters “IBM” out of individual atoms.

But I still like to think of an atom looking like George Michael.