Question: What exactly do you see when you at atom, is it anything like how we see it in school or is it completely different?

Ian Hands-Portman answered on 10 Mar 2014:

Sadly under the electron microscope they look quite dull – just little dark or light balls. What we see is not the nucleus with the electrons orbiting it – just the electron cloud itself. Luckily it’s not the atom’s themselves we’re interested in – a carbon atom is just a carbon atom – it’s how they fit together that’s more important – whether it’s a new piece of nanotechnology that you might find in your phone some day soon ( quantum dots ) or the atoms in proteins that our immune system uses to fight off a virus.