A movie out of atoms

[kakihara]

http://www.wimp.com/smallestmovie/

Honestly, it is about 8-10 years ago since i heared about the basics of atoms and molecules in school, but i didnt even think it would be remotly possible to acutally see real atoms until i saw that. And even then i checked multiple sources regarding this movie but it does seem like it is really legit.
I wonder how long did i miss that information? If i remember correctly in school i never heared that thats possible at all.

Edit: is it even like that? Or is it some kind of visualisation?

[Adam Jensen]

http://www.wimp.com/smallestmovie/

Honestly, it is about 8-10 years ago since i heared about the basics of atoms and molecules in school, but i didnt even think it would be remotly possible to acutally see real atoms until i saw that. And even then i checked multiple sources regarding this movie but it does seem like it is really legit.
I wonder how long did i miss that information? If i remember correctly in school i never heared that thats possible at all.

Scanning tunneling microscopes don't actually see atoms as much as feel them. If I remember correctly, they have an extremely thin probe that can detect individual atoms which is then processed into visual sense by a computer.

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasc...1/gen01122.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scannin...ing_microscope

I'm not aware of any microscope powerful enough to view an atom traditionally, with light and lenses. Last I heard that's impossible, but I'm not sure.

[kakihara]

After reading a bit i found about the scanning tunneling microscopes too. And that atoms dont acutally have a colour because they are smaller then the wavelenght of light or something like that. and since to acutally see atoms you need light at least without some kind of new technology it isnt possible to really see atoms.
So i guess "seeing" atoms that way is old news. Whats new about this video is that they can move single atoms i think.
awesome stuff anyway.

[Garnier Fructis]

I'm not aware of any microscope powerful enough to view an atom traditionally, with light and lenses. Last I heard that's impossible, but I'm not sure.

There also wouldn't be much to see, since atoms are pretty much empty space. To the best of our knowledge, electrons are point particles with no volume, so you couldn't even see those anyway.

[Thage]

And this is the sort of thing that made me fall in love with science to begin with, a love I'm only just rediscovering after twelve years of boring-ass science classes taught by teachers with no love for the subject did a good job of blunting that sense of wonder in the world it fostered.

[kakihara]

Stuff like that may had influenced me to be more into science too. I mean sure its nice to know how to calculate the speed of a pendulum, but it doesnt help to create curiosity. And if something bored you, chances are you wont dig deeper...

[Kaleredar]

Now that that's done, they can get back to calculating further digits of pi.

[Thage]

Stuff like that may had influenced me to be more into science too. I mean sure its nice to know how to calculate the speed of a pendulum, but it doesnt help to create curiosity. And if something bored you, chances are you wont dig deeper...

Calculating a pendulum's speed can be well and good if physics is your passion, that's just not where my interests lay. Now, geology and tectonic shifts, and how stars are born, live, and die, and how we are actively scouring the stars looking for another planet capable of sustaining human life through the Hubble Telescope and long-view telescopes on Earth?

Yeah, that stuff gives me a major science-on.

[Adam Jensen]

Calculating a pendulum's speed can be well and good if physics is your passion, that's just not where my interests lay. Now, geology and tectonic shifts, and how stars are born, live, and die, and how we are actively scouring the stars looking for another planet capable of sustaining human life through the Hubble Telescope and long-view telescopes on Earth?

Yeah, that stuff gives me a major science-on.

I'm a sucker for two sciences: Biology and Astronomy. The first because it amazes me that a mass of Carbon/Hydrogen/Oxygen/and-then-some can not only form complex life, but intelligent life. And the second because the size and scale of the universe is mindboggling. I'm also a bit of a fan of atoms and their parts because they're mindbogglingly small, but quantum mechanics makes my head ache.

[Elegiac]

Surreal Fun Fact: Atoms are 99% empty space.

[Gheld]

I'm not aware of any microscope powerful enough to view an atom traditionally, with light and lenses. Last I heard that's impossible, but I'm not sure.

A photon of light will interact with an atom in one of three ways:

#1. It will pass through it as though it's not there; providing you with absolutely no information.
#2. It will be reflected, changing it's direction (and possibly corrupting the information it gives you)
#3. It will be absorbed, thus energizing the atom (by forcing an electron into a higher energy level, which only becomes perceptible after the electron falls back to a lower energy level, in which case it is detectable as a photon whose direction of travel is completely random, making it an equally unreliable source of information.

Light makes for a terrible detecting method on the atomic level. Which is where electron microscopy comes in.

EDIT:

Surreal Fun Fact: Atoms are 99% empty space.

That really depends on which definition of empty you choose. The space between the electrons and the nucleus is full of quantum fluctuations and superposed electrons

[Wikiy]

Surreal Fun Fact: Atoms are 99% empty space.

Which isn't that fun when you realize that nothing in the universe takes up volume. Atoms are just discrete pockets of energy. The empty space between the electrons and the nucleus is a medium for extremely strong repulsive and attractive forces, which gives the atom a discrete shape and the illusion of being something with a volume.