If an atom could be enlarged such that we could see it with our naked eye, what would it look like? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

If an atom could be enlarged such that we could see it with our naked eye, what would it look like? “See” isn’t a thing for the quantum world. This is one of many things that makes quantum reality so confusing.

When you try to see electrons, you have to bounce a photon off of them. That photon then reaches your eye and you “see” that photon. The problem is that the interaction between photon and electron has changed the electron in unpredictable ways. It simply isn’t where you think it is anymore.

Multiply this by millions of photons, and you get a fuzzy cloud of electron density.

What’s more, some of these electrons will be promoted to higher energy levels when you hit them with a photon. You won’t see these photons - they’re not reflected back. But when the electron falls back down to a lower energy level, it can emit specific colors of light.

So your atom is going to glow. The electron cloud of Neon, for example, will look orange. Hydrogen will be pink. Mercury’s will look blue.

You can’t see the nucleus at all, unless of course you scale up the atom to enormous size. If you enlarged the atom to stadium sized, you’d be able to see the nucleus (through the electron cloud haze, of course) as a tiny marble-sized sphere in the middle. The nucleus would also look vaguely fuzzy, but you’d have a really hard time seeing it in most cases - the blur of the electron cloud would be in your way.

This fuzzy electron cloud wouldn’t be round in many cases - some atoms have oddly shaped electron orbitals like these:

You might be able to see these lobed shapes.

So what does an atom look like (scaled up)?

Kinda like this:

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