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A comment on A Boy and His Atom: Smallest Stop-Motion Film [video]. Parent comment

Re:A Boy and His Atom: Smallest Stop-Motion Film [video] by burkaman on Saturday October 14, 2017 @07:28PM (#15474905)
Atoms aren't the smallest thing, but that's sort of irrelevant, because this was "filmed" with a scanning tunneling microscope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope

It's not like normal photography, it's more of a visualization of an electrical current sensor. The background is just the area of the plane they were scanning that didn't have any atoms.

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Re:A Boy and His Atom: Smallest Stop-Motion Film [video] by Koshkin on Saturday October 14, 2017 @09:13PM (#15475300)
> didn't have any atoms

That sounds a bit weird...

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Re:A Boy and His Atom: Smallest Stop-Motion Film [video] by throwanem on Saturday October 14, 2017 @10:13PM (#15475492)
Didn't have any atoms sitting on it.
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Re:A Boy and His Atom: Smallest Stop-Motion Film [video] by craftyguy on Saturday October 14, 2017 @10:39PM (#15475579)
Well what was 'it' if it wasn't made of atoms?
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Re:A Boy and His Atom: Smallest Stop-Motion Film [video] by throwanem on Saturday October 14, 2017 @11:25PM (#15475718)
A slice of quantum foam.
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Re:A Boy and His Atom: Smallest Stop-Motion Film [video] by craftyguy on Sunday October 15, 2017 @12:38AM (#15475912)
Not quite.
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Re:A Boy and His Atom: Smallest Stop-Motion Film [video] by burkaman on Sunday October 15, 2017 @10:28PM (#15480486)
Just empty space. There's a smooth plane of atoms, then a few atoms that make up your frame on top of that, and everything else is vacuum.
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