The first video of individual atoms bonding and breaking | Hacker News Reader

The first video of individual atoms bonding and breaking

inverse.com

87 pointslysp11 comments

Can someone explain this to the uninitiated? I remember when that black hole picture came out, it turned out actually to be: "how this algorithm we invented generates an image of a black hole", so not really a "picture" in the colloquial sense.

Here I'm having trouble understanding how we could actually "record video" of a bond forming and I'm not even sure the words "record" and "video" are what I think they mean. For instance, could the frame rate of our video-recording technology really be high enough to "capture" something that probably happens near-instantaneously? And what "wavelength" is the light used to record these videos -- wouldn't it need to be tinier than the kind of light we usually use, in order to capture atoms? I'm sorry if this is vague, but I don't know enough terms to pose this question rigorously.

For the lazy it's a next level microscope making a short video of two 0.2nm black dots jamming into each other, walled in by grey carbon nanotubes.

They used TEM for imaging. https://www.umassmed.edu/cemf/whatisem/

Read the article, it didn't capture the minutia of a bond happening, just a few frames of what atoms look like when they do bond.

And 0.2nm is 1mm divided by 5 million.

And the other way 1g of rhenium contains 3234111231049296000000 atoms (3.23 x 10^21).

This experiment is looking at the joining of 2 individual atoms.

> how this algorithm we invented generates an image of a black hole", so not really a "picture" in the colloquial sense.

It is not as artificial as it appears.

What people see with their own eyes is an image generated by their brain using algorithms shaped by evolution.

Maybe we will have more breakthroughs as these visualization techniques improve.

This is truly an awesome accomplishment. Hats off to the scientists & engineers who made this happen.

About 7 years after this: https://youtu.be/oSCX78-8-q0

Original paper: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/3/eaay5849

and university press release this article seems based on: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/walking-with-atoms

I remember in an intro bio class we were shown simulated animations of how reactions occur. For example it depicted molecules floating perfectly and almost intently into an enzyme demonstrating the lock and key model.

The teacher made it point that the animations were not realistic in the sense that there should be a lot more stuff flying around. And a lot more denser and faster otherwise reactions simply wouldn't occur. But that chaos isn't educational to visualize.

So I guess my question is why does it look so neat in this real life video?

It looks so neat because you're looking at two atoms carefully placed on carbon nanotubes

Wow this is really exciting to watch.

Seeing the atoms jump around reminded me that at that scale things don't have definite locations like we'd intuitively expect. It is probably an artifact of the recording though, and not really related to the uncertainty principle. Could we double the framerate to see the intermediate positions?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com