system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What is the current layman's description of an atom that the scientific community deems acceptable?

When I was in middle school they told us that atoms consisted of electrons orbiting around a nucleus that itself primarily consisted of protons and neutrons.  When I got to university they told us that was wrong and said something like the electrons are moving so fast it can't be determined exactly where they are at any given time and that it was more like a probability cloud.  Does this mean that a given electron itself does not exist at any one particular place at some given time, or is it that it does, we just can't determine exactly where it is because of either limitations with current measurement technology or theoretical limitations with measurement technology in general? When I looked up the wikipedia article on atoms it seems to repeatedly refer to electrons as being bound to a nucleus rather than orbiting a nucleus.  Do scientists now think that it is inappropriate to refer to electrons as orbiting the nucleus?
gpt
When we are schoolchildren, we are generally taught that subatomic particles like electrons are little spheres orbiting around the nucleus in an atom.  But that isn't correct.  Subatomic particles aren't little spheres, they are more like matter waves.  There's simply no way to pin down the exact position of an electron in an atom, because it has no exact position.  What's the exact position of a wave?
   
Making matters worse, the uncertainty principle tells us that there's a chance that a given electron isn't even within the atom at all, at least for a brief time. There's a very very very small chance that an electron from an atom in your nose could be found on Mars! (Of course, it would be hard to tell, since all electrons are identical.)