orbitals - How do I visualize an atom?

I have searched and searched, oh how I have searched.

I am looking for a 3-dimensional visualization of a whole atom, one that that includes all the orbital geometry. A proper "layered" view of the orbitals.

What I am not looking for:

• Individual orbital geometry.



• A "picture" of an atom (i.e. what looks like television static to me).


• Little spherical balls.


• Dot-and-cross diagrams.

I think I understand that this cannot be expressed in just one picture alone, so I look forward to discovering software, or a collection of pictures, that could help express this. Maybe something similar to an exploded view, for atoms?

Please. The universe is weird and I want to see.

Answer

I have searched and searched, oh how I have searched.

Do you know what I always tell my mom when she asks me to find something in the Internet she was not able to find herself? I ask her: "Are you sure that the thing you are looking for even exists?"

I am looking for a 3 dimensional visualization of a whole (moderately complex, hydrogen is just a ball) atom that includes 3 dimensional orbital geometry.

1. Hydrogen atom is not "just a ball".


2. There is no orbitals. In short, except for one-electron systems (such as the hydrogen atom) orbital description is just an approximate model of the reality.


3. Usually when one asks to visualize a physical object, he/she wants to visualize its physical "boundaries" with respect to some medium. The notion of such "boundary" simply looses its meaning in the microscopic world: atoms do not have "boundaries" like macroscopic objects do.

Please. The universe is weird and I want to see.

Sorry, but you can not do this: you can not visualize some things in the Universe, you can not even imagine them. Our visualization & imagination abilities (unlike an atom) has some boundaries, because they are based ultimately on our senses which in turn has their boundaries.

As Paul Dirac said on that matter:

[…] the main object of physical science is not the provision of pictures, but is the formulation of laws governing phenomena and the application of these laws to the discovery of new phenomena. If a picture exists, so much the better; but whether a picture exists or not is a matter of only secondary importance. In the case of atomic phenomena no picture can be expected to exist in the usual sense of the word 'picture', by which is meant a model functioning essentially on classical lines. One may, however, extend the meaning of the word 'picture' to include any way of looking at the fundamental laws which makes their self-consistency obvious. With this extension, one may gradually acquire a picture of atomic phenomena by becoming familiar with the laws of the quantum theory.