Atoms star in ball-bothering boffins' Big Blue movie IBM Research has proved its worth by moving atoms across a screen to create the world's smallest movie. Big Blue has gone much better with its atomic animation A Boy and His Atom. The movie has 242 frames and lasts just under 100 seconds; any more and it would rapidly become turgidly boring, in your humble hack's opinion. Each …
These don't look like 'atoms', but the molecules which they actually are. There are two parts, if you look very carefully—which change orientation for various...pixtons? axels?—in the movie.
Methinks there's some IBM marketing bending here. Should be called A Boy (could be a girl, for that matter) and his Molecule.
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I believe it's copper. Possibly the imaging probe doesn't register conductor well, only molecules that don't conduct, or perhaps there's some tuning parameter that emphasizes Oxygen. However, as I mention above, the carbon atom is evident as a smaller item near the O, and it's not an imaging by-product. These are the CO molecules being imaged, not 'atoms'. Guinness should revise their record to 'molecule', because eventually someone is going to do this again with actual single atoms.
The background IS made of atoms. You can see the faint reflections of the atomic background around the actual subjects. The reasons they're so hard to see are:
1. The microscope is not focused on the background
2. The atoms in the actual subjects are reflecting more light than the atoms in the background, thus almost obscuring the light being reflected from the background itself.
Explosion, because that's the only reason atoms were invented.
"...lasts just under 100 seconds; any more and it would rapidly become turgidly boring..."
Boring? Rather depends upon that to which you've become accustomed. In the early days of videogaming (early/mid 70's), I spent MANY coins playing games with scarcely better graphics - Boot Hill, Astro Race, Sub Hunt, and many others. In fact, I intend to fire up the old MAME cabinet this evening and wax nostalgic in honor of this clever creation.
I raise my glass to boffins in general and IBM boffins in particular for this bit of cleverness. Why do something like this? Why the hell not?
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