The world of the atom was, indeed, very strange. It was difficult to form an accurate picture of an atom because there is nothing in our world to really compare it with.
Schrodinger's wave mechanics did not question what the waves were made of, however, he had to call it something so he gave it a symbol,
, from the Greek letter (psi).
In 1926, a German physicist, Max Born had an idea of what was. Born said that they were waves of chance. That is, the ripples that move along in waves of chance are made up of places where there may be particles and places where there are no particles. The waves of chance ripple around in circles when the particle is an electron in an atomic orbit and they ripple back and forth when the electron orbit goes straight through the nucleus and they ripple along in straight lines when a free particle is moving through interatomic space. It may be thought of as waves when traveling through space and as particles whenever they are located in space. However, they can not be both a waves and particles at the same time.
