Section 8: Atomic Structure and Periodicity

The basics

Most people know from middle school that an atom is made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Below is a brutally and horribly drawn (but copyright-free!) sketch generated by ChatGPT using HTML Canvas.

It turns out that this Bohr model, creatively named after Niels Bohr, is not so accurate. As Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg proposed, electrons do not move in fixed paths. Instead, they are likely to be found in specific regions in the electron cloud model, also generated copyright-free by ChatGPT: