What Does an Electron Look Like?

In school, you probably learned that an atom was like a little solar system with the nucleus as the sun and electrons as the planets. The problem is, as [The Action Lab] points out, the math tells us that if this simplistic model was accurate, matter would be volatile. According to the video you can see below, the right way to think about it is as a standing wave.

What does that mean? The video shows a very interesting demonstrator that shows how that works. You can actually see the standing waves in a metal ring. This is an analog — still not perfect — for the workings of an atom. An input frequency causes the ring to vibrate, and at specific vibration frequencies, a standing wave develops in the ring.

What was most interesting to us is that this explanation shows why electrons only increase and decrease in steps. Turns out nothing is really orbiting the way we all learned in school. Not that this model is exactly correct either, but it is apparently closer to reality than the old-school model.

Electrons are one of those funny things that sometimes look like a wave and sometimes look like a particle. Not that we fully grok all the quantum weirdness. Maybe we half understand it, and half don’t understand it.

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• Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/03/06/what-does-an-electron-look-like/