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Photo of a suspended, glowing single atom wins photography prize
- mdorazio 7y agoNeeds a (2018) tag.
- novacole 7y agoIt’s not an atom, it’s a picture of the light emitted from an atom. So it’s a picture of light.
- crooked-v 7y agoAll pictures are actually pictures of the light either emitted by or reflected from things.
- novacole 7y agoWhat does this atom look like? Do you see an atom or do you see light? Of course, all pictures are pictures of light. But there’s a difference between taking a picture of the light coming from a light bulb and a picture of a light bulb, as I am sure you’re aware.
- kragen 7y agoThere isn't, no.
- garmaine 7y agoIt is the same exact thing.
- msla 7y ago> But there’s a difference between taking a picture of the light coming from a light bulb and a picture of a light bulb, as I am sure you’re aware. OK, explain it.
- novacole 7y agoLook at a light bulb when the filament is heated and is emitting light. Then look at it when it is not. The only people who can’t see the difference are blind, literally.
- scrollaway 7y agoYou're looking for the word "glow". People are (somewhat rightfully) piling up on you because all pictures indeed are pictures of light, whether that light is reflected by an inactive lightbulb or is from its powered, glowing filament.
- kragen 7y agoWhen the filament is cold, you can see it because of light that comes from it after having been reflected off of it, rather than having been emitted from it originally; or, if it's dark on a light background, because of light that comes from other parts of the lightbulb after being transmitted through it from behind. In all of these cases, what you see in the photo is light that came from the lightbulb, and all of them are equally legitimately "pictures of the lightbulb", although they might display more or less detail.
- bnegreve 7y agoIn the first one you can see details.
- RantyDave 7y agoCeci n'est pas une pipe.
- RantyDave 7y agoDespite the haters, this is pretty much on the money. This is the light scattered from a single atom that came through the lens and hit exactly just one pixel on the sensor. That dot is (guessing) millions of times larger than an actual single atom.
- DanTheManPR 7y agoThis is the most pedantic thing I've ever seen posted on HN. If an object is illuminated by the sun or by a flashlight, you see the light. When you illuminate a single strontium atom with a laser while it's suspended in an ion trap, you see the light.
- ebg13 7y agoFrom the article: you can see with the naked eye Also from the article: long exposure photograph Only one of those is correct. Naked eyes can't do long exposures.
- dylan604 7y agoYou can use your naked eye to view the long exposure photo?
- ebg13 7y ago+_+
- FreakyT 7y agoNot necessarily; cameras in general tend to have much worse low light performance than our eyes. Take, for example, the night sky. You can easily see the stars with the naked eye, but try getting them to show up in a photo. You’ll almost certainly need a long exposure.
- ramraj07 7y agoHe didn't say he saw it with his naked eye though. However, at least by some metrics, the human eye can detect even a single photon. So if he shut off all other sources of visible light in the room, and sat there for a bit, he should start seeing the light (assuming he's young, red light perception decreases the older you get). But then, for this to work, the only detail you need on your side is proof that only one atom is emitting light.
- lisper 7y agoIt is true that naked eyes can't do long exposures. It is not true that you can't do a long exposure of something that is also visible to the naked eye.
- mortenjorck 7y agoIn theory, at least, the atom could be emitting enough light and oscillating over a large enough area that persistence of vision could result in a visible dot to the naked eye.
- bishalb 7y agoI thought atoms were invisible even with advanced microscopes.
- robjan 7y agoFTA: "The Strontium atom appears larger than its true size because it was emitting light, and was oscillating slightly, over the course of the long exposure."
- cmroanirgo 7y agoThanks for that, (I missed the comment in the article), because my skeptic-o-meter was maxing out. You can see the machining marks on the electrodes. There's even screws to be seen in the photo, which makes the 'atom' about the size of a largish dust particle, using a rough guess.
- fsh 7y agoI believe the journalist misunderstood this point. Trapped ions do oscillate somewhat, but the amplitude should be way below the resolution of this imaging system. Most likely the finite spot size is due to the finite resolution and maybe some blooming from over-exposure.
- mattkrause 7y agoExactly. It's really imaging the point-spread function of the camera + window.
- RantyDave 7y agoIt's a very accurate way of doing it though. You know exactly where the point source is and ... that it is as close to a point as you're going to get. I wonder if this has an application in optics?
- mattkrause 7y ago
- kragen 7y agoA similar phenomenon makes it possible to see 4-meter-wide dirt roads in the country on 15-meter-resolution Landsat photos.
- mirimir 7y ago> NoScript detected a potential Cross-Site Scripting attack > from https://edge.bigthink.com https://edge.bigthink.com to https://js.stripe.com https://js.stripe.com. > Suspicious data: > (URL) https://js.stripe.com/v3/elements-inner-card-212...b40.html#style[base][fontFamily]="Gotham+Narrow+SSm+A",+"Gotham+Narrow+SSm+B",+"Helvetica+Neue",+Helvetica,+Roboto,+Arial,+sans-serif&style[base][fontSize]=14px&style[base][color]=#1a1a1a&componentName=card&wait=false&rtl=false&keyMode=live&apiKey=pk_live_cFe...AEV&origin=https://edge.bigthink.com&referrer=https://edge.bigthink.com/users/subscribe?p=1&pu=1&utm_medium=organic&utm_source=bigthink&controllerId=__privateStripeController1 https://js.stripe.com/v3/elements-inner-card-212...b40.html#... WTF is that about? Setup for "Join Premium"? But why talk to Stripe in advance? Edit: Hey, I apologize for going off topic. But I'm just a little surprised that a site would want to trigger XSS warnings. And why they'd risk it.
- baq 7y agometa: this is one of those achievements where unsubstantial comment policy is really going against human nature. my initial instinct is to just type 'holy shit' and a line of exclamation marks.
- clarry 7y agoHow do you handle a single atom? How do you know there's only one atom?
- TeMPOraL 7y agoIANAPhysicist, but my guess would be, you set up your atom trap in such a way that conditions/forces/solutions to wave equation/whatever exclude any states except "no atom" and "a single atom".
- fsh 7y agoThere is a number of trapping techniques for ions (Paul trap, Penning trap) and for neutral atoms (magneto-optical trap, optical tweezer, optical lattice). In the case of trapped ions, their mutual repulsion keeps them tens of micrometers apart, so one can easily resolve the individual ions on a camera image with modest magnification. This is an image of 9 ions taken by the same group that made the artistic image in the article: https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/imce/248/ca43xtal.jpg https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/imce/248/c... For neutral atoms one can for example have a tweezer whose trapping region is so small that only a single atom fits inside.
- CGamesPlay 7y ago> When I set off to the lab with camera and tripods one quiet Sunday afternoon, I was rewarded with this particular picture of a small, pale blue dot. I wonder if this was deliberate, for me it poetically evokes Carl Sagan. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot
- mclightning 7y agoI would be surprised if it wasn't
- sidcool 7y agoAs far as my limited understanding goes, the atom does not strictly have an enclosure like a marble. It's a probabilistic space with nucleus at the centre. So here, are we looking at the nucleus itself?
- kijin 7y agoI don't think nuclei emit any light except when they're either fusing or breaking apart. The light is probably coming from a cloud of excited electrons, a certain number of which have an extremely high probability of existing near each Strontium nucleus.
- the8472 7y ago> I don't think nuclei emit any light except when they're either fusing or breaking apart. There's always exceptions, thorium has a low-energy isomer that decays via gamma rays that are in the UV range. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_thorium#Thorium-229m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_thorium#Thorium-22...
- fsh 7y agoYou are probably thinking of the electron orbitals which describe the spatial distribution of where the electrons are located. Their characteristic length scale is thousands of times smaller than the wavelength of light, so there is absolutely no way of resolving this structure. From an optical perspective an atom simply looks like an infinitely small radiating dipole. The nucleus itself is again tens of thousands of times smaller than the orbitals. Due to this small size and very high resonance energies, nuclei don't interact with visible light at all.
- moralestapia 7y agoHow do they know it's one single atom instead of a small bunch of them?
- ajdegol 7y agoThat site is pretty painful to visit. Is it someone’s business model to submit stuff like this to hacker news? Edit: I mean it’s called BigThink; does the flashing adverts (on mobile) between every sentence not make that name a little ironic?
- Tenoke 7y agoAlso clicking on the image when it said 'click on image to zoom' led me to multiple ad sites.
- rendall 7y agoBigThink inspired me to find out if it's possible to exclude results from Google search results. It's not. At least, not through Google. With DuckDuckGo, it's possible by including `-site:bigthink.com` in the search query
- onorton 7y agoYou can exclude search terms on google with a "-" prefix including websites e.g. "-twitter" "-bigthink"
- miahi 7y agoThe same -site:bigthink.com flag works on Google searches.
- aendruk 7y agoGoogle used to provide a way to do this, but removed it (see killedbygoogle #674) around the same time they dropped "don't be evil".
- MaximusAR 7y agoWhat does anything have to do the origin of the atom? If it is a single atom, it doesn't have the properties of its molecule. The following sentence makes me think all the article is BS, or the reporter confused a molecule with an atom ---> "Strontium is a soft, silvery metal that burns in air and reacts with water. It's best known for giving fireworks and flares their brilliant red glow, and for being one of the key ingredients in 'glow-in-the-dark' paints and plastics, as it can absorb light and re-emit it slowly. Which is exactly what happened in this photograph."
- krastanov 7y agoThe choice of atoms in these experiments have a lot to do with the way they interact with light. This is very much related to their behavior in chemistry and paints. Sure, not all properties are the same as for the bulk material, especially if we are talking about metals, but many do carry over.
- jacquesm 7y agoBetter link, article is (2018) https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/02/trapped-atom-photograph-long-exposure-competition-spd/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/02/trapped-atom... Also, modals that lock the page should be forbidden.