It’s a challenge to talk about the atomic structure of matter because our language evolved from a sensual experience of the physical world. Looking at atomic models and saying they’re spherical, there is a tendency to think of a solid. But rather, it’s an energetic polarity that bounds the shape of things. When we talk about the quantum world we use mathematics, statistics, and probability to describe how the particles of the atom behave. For physicists, “particle” refers to elements with behavior much different than we expect from particles in the physical world.
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