What Do Atoms Really “Look Like?”
First off, in order to have a “look,” things have to reflect light. Since atoms are far tinier than light waves, we can’t see them with light. After physicists discovered that atoms were made of a positive nucleus surrounded by negative electrical charge, they began wondering why the charges remained apart. An obvious analogy was planets orbiting the Sun. One problem with this idea was that if you force electrons to travel curving paths, they emit radiation. Electrons should emit radiation, lose energy, and spiral into the nucleus. Physicists were forced to postulate that for some reason, electrons around atoms simply didn’t do this. Also, since the electrons had definite energy levels, they postulated that one of the rules of atoms was that electrons could only have specific energies, and nothing in between those energy levels. Using these rules, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr came up with a model of atoms much like a solar system. Although textbooks usually show Bohr’s atom as havin
