Electron Strobe Makes Movies of Atoms 33
holy_calamity writes "Some grainy black and white movies are receiving rave reviews from scientists. They are taken by a new microscope which, thanks to a 'strobing' electron gun, can image movement at sub-nanometer scales. Until now, only still images that smeared out movement were possible at such scales. The press release notes, 'The researchers first blasted the sample with a pulse of heat. The heated carbon atoms began to vibrate in a random, nonsynchronized fashion. Over time, however, the oscillations of the individual atoms became synchronized as different modes of the material locked in phase, emerging to become a heartbeat-like "drumming."' Further details and a few animations are available at Caltech's site."
Very import research (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Heisenberg? (Score:4, Informative)
I think the uncertainty principal is still safe. What they are doing is equivalent to what they've been able to do before, only fast enough to give an impression of motion.
If you think about measurement at that scale as being equivalent to throwing tennis balls at a basketball and looking at where the tennis balls end up to calculate where the basketball must be, then even if you throw more tennis balls you are still affecting the basketball in an unpredictable way.
Re:Heisenberg? (Score:2, Informative)
heisenberg's uncertainty principle applies to subatomic particles, e.g. electrons, protons, neutrons, etc.
It's rubbish (Score:5, Informative)
It actually applies to everything. (Score:4, Informative)
It's just that the bigger something is, the less significant the uncertainty is.