If you’re like everybody else in the world, you’ve probably seen all types of movies—from good movies to not-so-good movies to bad movies to Adam Sandler movies. But chances are you haven’t seen an atom movie. Check it out.
[View:http://youtu.be/oSCX78-8-q0]
OK, it looks like some kind of throwback thing from the early days of Pong video games, I know. But as the movie says, you’re actually watching a film casted and created from a bunch of carbon monoxide atoms. Yep, the basest of life’s building blocks. And just in case you’re wondering just how teeny tiny an atom really is, you can get an amusing idea from this clip.
So obviously IBMs movie is a pretty incredible feat. And it’s made even more so by the fact that those crazy scientists had to do everything in a vacuum (’cause you don’t want unwanted particles dropping into the middle of your shoot), had to film at an average temperature of -268° Celsius (because those feisty little atoms had to be slowed to a manageable frozen state) and they needed to stage everything by pushing and pulling atoms around with a needle sharpened to a single atom itself.
Phew. Talk about a lot of work for a 94-second commercial.
Of course, they didn’t do all that just for the commercial. Or for the hope of creating a feature-length film full of amusing atom antics. It’s for something much bigger, or as Chandrasekhar Narayan, director of science and technology at IBM Research, told Slate, “This project is about understanding how to guide materials at atomic levels into formations where they can exhibit interesting properties.” Translation: We want to store all our junk on an atomic level. That may sound like rather ho-hum info. But if you think about it, it’s pretty cool stuff. “Early work we did about a year ago indicated we need somewhere in the neighborhood of just 12 atoms in order to store data for hours or days,” Narayan said.
I know we’re talking about something so incredibly tiny that it’s almost impossible to imagine. But think of it in these terms: Remember how neat it felt when you could save an armful of DVDs on your sizable computer hard drive? Well if they make this new atom tech stable, you’ll be able to save all the movies ever made in the history of man—including all those lost celluloid masterpieces that are rotting away in some forgotten vault—on a storage device somewhere around the size of your fingernail. (Talk about scratching that movie itch!)
Here’s to the future.
Recent Comments