High School Can we build a microscope to see an atom?

[Helloworld75344]

If someone, were to theoretically build a microscope that could see an atom what, would the electrons be doing?...would they be orbiting the nucleus at a steady speed or would they be popping in and out of existence in their shells in different locations due to the uncertainty principle?

 

[anorlunda]

None of those. Here is a picture as close as you'll ever get. It was taken by a scanning tunneling microscope. Each bump is an atom.

Read this for more info https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope

 

[A.T.]

If someone where to theoretically build a microscope that could see a atom what would the electrons be doing?...would they be orbiting the nucleus at a steady speed or would they be popping in and out of existence in there shells in different locations due to the uncertainty principle.

What you would see, would depend on how your hypothetical microscope works.

 

[CWatters]

First Picture of the Hydrogen Atom​

 

[Drakkith]

If someone where to theoretically build a microscope that could see a atom what would the electrons be doing?...would they be orbiting the nucleus at a steady speed or would they be popping in and out of existence in there shells in different locations due to the uncertainty principle.

Neither. Electrons don't orbit the nucleus in neat little orbits like the planets orbiting the Sun do. Nor do they pop into and out of existence. The uncertainty principle just states that their future location and momentum can't both be simultaneously known to any arbitrary precision. For example, if I trap an electron in a very small potential well so that its position is well known, any future measurements of its momentum have a large range of possible values. This in itself says nothing about the electron ceasing to exist between measurements.

Also, keep in mind that it is quite difficult to say with certainty what the electrons are doing in their orbitals. Not only do they not act "classically", meaning that they don't act in an intuitive manner like classical particles, their behavior changes depending on how we choose to observe them. A scanning electron microscope observing the atoms of a crystal will give you a different view than X-ray crystallography. An optical microscope capable of resolving such tiny details would give you yet another picture. Note that this doesn't mean that the electrons are choosing to behave differently, it just means that different instruments interact differently with the electrons and will thus give different pictures, all of which are valid.

Describing how the electrons are behaving in between measurements is problematic as well. The general view of physics is that because of the uncertainty in its position, momentum, and other properties, we cannot say anything about what a particle is doing in-between measurements. We can't say where it's at, what its momentum is, how it's oriented, or anything else really. We can only talk about the probability that a future measurement will find it with a particular position, momentum, etc.