What Does the Structure of an Atom Look Like?

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Brian with ericksontutoring.blogspot.com. Today we're going to discuss what the structure of an atom looks like. So atoms are the basic building blocks of all certain molecules; their basic building blocks and they're compose of three parts. You have neutrons, you have protons and you have electrons. It used to be thought that a nucleus or I'm sorry, an atom looks something like a plum pudding. So you have this sort of mixture with maybe some raisins in it and that the nucleus, the nuclei; so protons and neutrons were spread out all over the place. This turned out to be extremely wrong. So in your atom; this is a very generic drawing of an atom; it's hard to see atoms, we can't see atoms really too well. But this is what they look like. You have a proton which is a positively charge particle and you have a neutron which is a neutrally charge particle. These are associated with each other and they're inside of a sort of center location called the nucleus. The term was stolen from biology; but that's okay; we'll let them use it in this context. So you have nucleus with the proton and neutron. Then you have an electron outside somewhere, sort of orbiting around, traveling around them circles; around the nucleus. The main component of an atom is space. There's one analogy that I've heard several times now that if you have, if you're at Yankee stadium and you had a fly on second base, the fly would represent your nucleus; so the proton and neutron. And then your very first electron, that's orbiting around that nucleus would be in the very top deck in the outfield, in the very last seat. That would be the first electron. So there's a ton of space inside an atom. That's mostly space. Now it's a little tricky though because protons and neutrons act like particles; they act like real things. They act like, like a tiny piece, like a tiny bowling ball. But electrons, they act more like waves. They act like light; so they, they're not really behaving in the same way that, that particles do. And so a lot of times instead of drawing an orbit, we, we draw sort of this cloud around the nucleus to represent where the electron is, is probably going to be found. So this has been a brief description of the structure of an atom and what it looks like."