I heard that the protons and neutrons are in orbits within the nucleus! 1)What is in the middle of the nucleus that they revolve around? 2) Can only a certain maximum number of nucleons be in each orbit, as is the case with the electrons? 3) Are there little separate orbits for neutrons and protons or are they mixed miscellaneously? 4) How are the orbits spaced out or how far are they from each other?
5) Even though I look in technical books on atomic particles, I have never found any pictures. What really prevents pictures, for when particles are called particles, they must have something in mind even though they always weasel out and call on the Uncertainty Principle. 6) Are the proton and neutron orbits all in the same plane, or is it as it is with the electrons, where they are in an area such as a sphere surface, but in no necessarily specific or determinable place on the surface?
Not only are protons and neutrons not in orbit, but really, neither are electrons. Electrons are in a state with an assosciated angular momentum, beyond what they have intrinsicly, but the meaning of the word “angular momentum” is sufficiently different in quantum mechanics that this does not imply an orbit, per se. Folks who invoke the Uncertainty Principal are not weaseling; you can’t draw a diagram of the atom if you don’t know where anything is in there, and you can’t find that out without changing where they are, so you’re still not right.
The nucleons in the center don’t even have an “orbital” angular momentum, but they can have energy levels and excited states. In practice, this is seldom significant, since the nuclear excited states are at much higher energies than those of the electrons, so you need hard gamma rays or the equivalent to produce them.
You don’t find many pictures because it’s really hard to make pictures. Whatever is really going on down there is totally unlike our everyday experiences. You might find The Atomic Orbitals: Atom in a Box interesting … but don’t think of electrons moving around like that, those are probability maps. The darker colors are where the electrons are most likely to be, but we don’t know how they move … we kind of suspect that our simplistic concept of motion doesn’t apply to electrons.