Chemistry Vs Middle School Essay

Quarter one has been quite a journey so far, especially with some drastic differences in workload and difficulty overall, compared to middle school. I specifically remember an interesting learning experience in Chemistry this year, just a couple of weeks ago. It was the introduction to the Atoms and Electrons unit. Now, I understand it this doesn’t sound too enthralling at first, but I discovered that everything I had known about atoms was completely wrong. My science teacher started off by showing us some vague pictures of this dark-to-light blue fog over a bright dot in the very center. Of course, no one could guess exactly what the picture was depicting. I had absolutely no idea what this figure was, and certainly didn’t expect him to say that scientifically, that’s an accurate depiction of an atom. I immediately thought about the classic “atom” diagram shown on most websites, which is the big sphere in the middle, with 5 neat oval orbits of electrons quickly moving around. It turned out that me, and most others, were wrong in thinking this, when the teacher actually explained how electrons simply don’t neatly orbit like that, but instead have “probable areas”. I recall we were all pretty baffled to hear this idea. …show more content…
We later learned that we can never be certain of where a particular electron is in the atom. We also cannot perfectly predict its path as a neat ellipse. In fact, we can only “guess” where they are located! “Guess” may not be the best term to use though, because the probability clouds are calculated with a complex formula with 4 variables. I won’t bore you with the math relating to it, but I will say that the closest we can get to knowing the position of an atom, is the probability it could be at a certain spot. but I can say that an atom is very different than what popular culture usually