Well, the picture of little balls flying around the nucleus is certainly wrong, but then you replace it with a picture is which probably even more wrong. I mean really, fuzzy little balls of "probability" creating balloon animal shaped orbitals. It is almost laughable. What direct evidence do we have for this picture compared with the old one? This might be plausible for small atoms, but what about uranium with 92 electrons? How can the electrons possibly maintain their stately positions around the nucleus which is still a speck in the volume of the atom? Does that really make any realistic mechanical sense to you? The other MAJOR problem is that if all those electrons are on the outside is that coulomb's law (which is very distance dependent) would say that all those exterior electrons must repel and it seems highly unlikely that anything like a uranium atom shielded by 92 electrons could possibly stick together into a solid. What is this "strong force" that is so strong within the nucleus, but absolutely nothing outside of it and has never been experimentally measured? Where is your "picture" of a uranium atom? So, do we have the atom all wrong? Yes! Do we still have it wrong? Most certainly.
I think it is high time we rethink the atom from scratch and start with the basic building blocks of atoms which are protons, neutrons and electrons and arrange these blocks according to the known laws of physics to build a model which tells the true story of the atom. Just like it was difficult to determine the physical shape of DNA, it is even more difficult to determine the shape of atoms so that we can build up uranium atoms as geometric objects which are self stable and explain the electron ionization energy patterns, the fixed chemical bonding angles and why atoms split in extremely uneven 25/75 splits instead of 50/50.
Such an attempt to completely re-write the atom can be found in my paper:
http://vixra.org/pdf/1303.0184v1.pdf
Whether this hypothesis is right or wrong is not the point. The point is that there ARE ways to look at the construction of the atom which is totally different, but still matches much of the known experimental evidence. It is possible to stop the electron juggling act and to eliminate the need for strange counterintuitive concepts such as the strong force. This can be all be replaced by intuitive tinker-toy Lego block constructions. So take this as an example of just how wrong we could still be about the structure of the atom.
