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IBM Makes a Movie Out of Atoms
harrymcc writes "IBM's Almaden Research Center has a scanning tunneling microscope, a device invented by the company. It uses it to move individual atoms around — mostly for storage research. But it's created a 242-frame cartoon, A Boy and His Atom, using individual atoms as pixels. Guinness has certified it as the world's smallest movie."
242 frames, and ten 18-hour days of work by multiple people using a very tiny copper needle attached to an expensive machine to move the atoms around.
What a waste of time.
Someone you trust is one of us.
A sodium atom and a potassium atom are walking down the street when suddenly the sodium atom stops with a concerned look. "I just lost an electron" he said. "Are you sure?" asked the potassium atom. The sodium atom replied with, "Yeah, I'm positive."
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
A big bang, if you will.
Past a certain point, super-high resolution could get quite interesting: once your "pixel" structures get smaller than visible light wavelengths, you can use them to form interference patterns to not only control the brightness, but also the wavefront shape of transmitted light --- A.K.A. holograms. Then you get a "true" 3D display, which recreates the proper relation between binocular depth perception and how far out each eye is focused.