is there a center of an atom?

Question

once u find the center of a cell or atom u come across mostly space right? so whats inside that space? do u ever get to an actual center point of an atom? or would it go on forever into its self? i think u know what i mean... any ideas?

Answer 1

An atom is actually pretty solid (except for the zeros in the radial component of the wave function). Your misunderstanding arises from experiments by Rutherford who shot alpha particles through atoms and saw them mostly fly through.

Well, the meaning of that experiment is as follows:

If you are an anatomist who uses a 20mm machine gun to explore the biological structures of human corpses, you will observe bullets to mostly go through. Only the rare case of a bullet that hits the spine from the end and gets lodged in it will indicate that the body is not empty.

So the "biologist" who does machine gun anatomy will conclude that the human body is formless and mostly nothing except for a tiny cylindrical core.

But once you use a precision probe to see what is inside an atom like an x-ray beam, you are getting to see a lot of structure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_crystallography
http://ucxray.berkeley.edu/~jamesh/movies/

In other words: Rutherford's result that the atom was mostly empty is true, but only if you are a nuclear physicist who simply does not care about electrons. If you happen to be an atomic physicist or chemist, atoms look actually rock solid. The inner electrons of heavier atoms are actually relativistic and there is nothing a chemist could ever do to move them by even a iota!

Sadly enough, we do not teach our students the level of refined logical thinking that is required to understand that the world can look different depending on how one looks at it. This is especially true with the Rutherford atom model... which is valid but taught in a horribly distorted fashion.

I am absolutely sure Mr. Rutherford understood all of this perfectly well and he knew what his experiment did (to look for the nucleus, not electronic orbitals). It is our high school text books that fail.

I hope this helps.

Answer 2

The Atom has a center. Just like the Earth has a center. In the center of the earth exist at least one atom.
At the center of the atom is a nucleus and a the centre of the nucleus is at least one Neutron and at the center of the Neutron is a least one micromass of light particle.
And at the center of space is at least one space particle.

Answer 3

the nucleus is the center of an atom.

Answer 4

YEAH, our world are mostly hollow-- there may be electrons and other basic element in our universe, but they only occupy a little small comparing to the whole universe......... our world is hollow for most part of it

Answer 5

Sorry, I don't understad your question