First Detailed Photos of Atoms

You'd be amazed that, to this day, there are "people" (I put that word in quotes because I often wonder if crackpots are really people) who still dispute the QM description of the atom. It's the same disease as those people who still think we didn't land on the moon or that the earth is flat, I suppose.

Well, chalk this up to another one of those "the more they test it, the more convincing it becomes". Using field-emission electron microscope, we can now really map the electronic orbitals. And SURPRISE! It clearly matches QM's description!

Quantum mechanics states that an electron doesn't exist as a single point, but spreads around the nucleus in a cloud known as an orbital. The soft blue spheres and split clouds seen in the images show two arrangements of the electrons in their orbitals in a carbon atom. The structures verify illustrations seen in thousands of chemistry books because they match established quantum mechanical predictions.

I'll edit this and put in the exact reference when the paper is out.

Zz.