How do we know so much about atoms even though we can't see them?

Truth be told, a lot is actually not well understood about atoms. The present interpretation of it is by no means cold hard factual science - it's just the best we have.

>>9129371
what are you, fucking blind? how can you not see them?

>>9129371
Mass spectronomy
Elemental analysis
Infrared spectroscopy
Nuclear magnetic resonance
X-ray crystallography

literraly 1 second with google.

File: atoms.jpg (35KB, 381x303px) Image search: [Google]

35KB, 381x303px

>>9129371

>>9129817
These were still scanned using an electron microscope physically touching each individual atom, you're "seeing" the atoms as much as poking the bottom of a river with a stick is "seeing" what the bottom is like

>>9130292

hey moron, what do you think 'seeing' is?
the sun pokes the world with little photon 'sticks' and they bounce in your eyes.

>>9129371
Id reccomend a read up on the early models of the atom and ideas of its structure. Basically the idea started that if you were to break something down enough, you would reach a stage where what was left of ot couldnt be broken down further. Dalton looked into this by suggesting everything was made up of atoms. After that people like Rutherford and Bohr further developed the atom through experiments like the golden foil experiment which suggested that atoms had nuclei. There was also (and likely, there still is) a lot of speculation over what the atom was until these experiments.

Also we can sort of see atoms under electron microscopes

>>9129371
Structure confirmations were originally done by constructing molecules synthetically from smaller ones with known structures. X-ray crystallography allows for the determination of actual atomic positions in crystallizable substances. High resolution NMR is replacing XRD.

>>9129371
most of the stuff we know is about hydrogen. Everything else is just physicists extrapolating that model to larger atoms. The real behavior of even small atoms like carbon is still unknown, and same for entire molecules which can behave as one entity. My guess is that algebraic combinatorics will be used in some high level version of quantum physics and it's going to explain how to calculate things even for very large atoms/structures.