IBM Makes a Movie Out of Atoms 102
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.
Wait... it's not porn (Score:5, Funny)
What a waste of time.
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I thought of that too, and was hoping the boy would feed his girlfriend to the atom at the end. Would it have gobbled her up like a black hole?
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That was my first thought. I saw the movie with pre-"Miami Vice" Don Johnson.
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It's only a matter of time, and then the technology will take off.
Future Hollywood Titles (Score:5, Funny)
or... Music Videos? Re:Future Hollywood Titles (Score:2)
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Thank you HR Lamar Smith.
Does anyone else have any comments?
Re:Wait... it's not porn (Score:4, Insightful)
A waste to you perhaps, but not to the people who do this hoping to show what can be done with the current technology - and hoping to inspire viewers to push boundaries and create things themselves. Maybe even pushing the technology onto better things - like creating medical nano-machines capable of removing tumours, or shrinking memory chip dies to allow you to cram more memory into your phone, etc.
What would get someone's attention faster - a stuffy presentation with ideas presented from a list, or something like this which could make you think for yourself? Instead of boilerplating a whine, why not tell us WHY it's a waste of time, huh?
Re:Wait... it's not porn (Score:4, Informative)
I'm pretty sure they were just making a joke. The title of his post states that it's a waste because it isn't porn, making reference to the joke that the Internet is made for porn and that sadly porn often ends up pushing media technology to be adopted by consumers.
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"Fucking words, how do they work?" --Angeret
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At least all the characters are nude...
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and a waste of atoms.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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But... (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't every movie made out of atoms?
Re:But... (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know... it's usually all photons and sound waves by the time it gets to me.
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Strictly speaking, sound waves are not made of atoms, but of energy passing through atoms.
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Isn't every movie made out of atoms?
In this case it's just a question of quantity.
At least their render times are pretty short - how long does it take to ray-trace something a few atoms wide?
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DPI? (Score:1)
How does that translate into DPI???
Re:DPI? (Score:5, Interesting)
How does that translate into DPI???
According to this [independent.co.uk] report, the movie depicts an area of 45 x 25 nanometers. I use the body of the stickman to approximate pixels, which gives me about 30 pixels in height. Which translates to 3 * 10^7 [wolframalpha.com] DPI. Which will be in your iPhone 71's über-retina display (assuming dpi grows exponentially). Although it's really debatable if your eye is capable of making use of such a high resolution.
Re:DPI? (Score:4, Informative)
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Yeah, that's the problem with you Americans. Your don't acknowledge that all important Slashdot stories occur on May 1, and thus you need to get a free day at that day. All other countries have a free day today.
Re:DPI? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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But how would you handle addressing all those pixels? You'd also need either a supercomputer-in-a-box to render the image, or a storage medium with the speed and capacity to playback a prerecorded hologram.
Assuming you want motion, that is. If you can just print fixed pixels small enough, you can print holograms. This approach limits you still to monochromatic images - you need changeable pixels if you want to do the R-G-B interleave to simulate color images.
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Yes, there are many other engineering/technology hurdles to cross to usefully generate dynamic holograms. However, I don't think there's anything particularly impassable in this case.
With such display technology, I doubt you'd think in terms of addressing/storing individual "pixels" in one "centralized" place; instead, you might have hardware DSPs behind "macropixels" ("normal pixel"-sized arrays of the light-wavelength-scale micropixels) which would receive 3D models and calculate the transform into the in
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Trying to interleve colored pixels would lead to horrible interference problems degrading image quality. I was thinking of temporal interleave, like how a DLP projector does it. You'd need to be able to generate and display holograms at 75fps though. The hypothetical 'holoprojector' surface basically is just a DLP chip, but crazily more precise and many times larger.
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Spatially interleaving color pixels would produce issues similar to viewing the world through a window screen --- yes, there are diffraction artifacts, but it's not a completely horrible unrecognizable view. Furthermore, you could move to non-periodic tilings for the colors which would eliminate obvious diffraction spikes. Temporal interleaving would indeed work too (and better in some aspects); we'll have to get a lot closer to production-ready technology than we currently are to assess what particular app
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I think at that point you'd be producing vibrations, oscillations or disruption patterns specific to the regions you need to change... an analog signal I suppose. Your CRT tv takes an analog signal and displays it on an analog screen. Digital might not be the way to go here.
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But how would you handle addressing all those pixels? You'd also need either a supercomputer-in-a-box to render the image
I'm sure they'll have that reasonably worked out by the time the iPhone 71 is the "best iPhone ever".
Battery life will probably suck, though... hoping they get some advancements on that front, too.
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A holographic display like this would likely require a coherent laser backlight, but there's no fundamental reason you couldn't just do that (with similar efficiency to solid-state LED lighting currently in use). In 3D tech available today like the Nintendo 3DS, your eyes focus at a fixed distance on a screen, while receiving different images to provide stereo depth cues. This is mismatched from how you see real-life 3D objects, where your eye also changes focus to see closer or farther details, and the per
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Yep, nothing like a large monopolistic megacorporation, flush with cash from big lucrative government contracts, to highlight the success of free enterprise research. Like the old Bell Labs during the telco monopoly days, when a corporation gets so big and rich that it can afford to have whole divisions entirely isolated from worrying about market competition, it can do far-forward-looking work (just like all the directly government-funded research labs, also free from dealing with "the markets" to set thei
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I am curious as to exactly what you think IBM has a monopoly on.
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I said "monopolistic," which doesn't require an absolutely pure monopoly, but for a lot of "big data," mainframe, and supercomputing applications, the market is certainly an oligopoly with only a handful of big players (which produces economic results very similar to pure monopoly). Anyway, in ideal pure competition, profit margins are reduced to zero --- everyone is scrabbling to be immediately responsive to market forces, not able to raise prices so far above production costs that they have oodles of cash
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So, in other words, you were just trolling? Stringing together a bunch of inflammatory words to make it sound like something nefarrious was happening, but with enough weaslness built in that you claim otherwise.
Your version of 'ideal' competition sounds like pure hell, where nothing new would ever be created because the is exactly zero motive to do anything. No thanks.
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My version of 'ideal' competition, straight out of the basic Econ 101 definitions, is considered the basic motivation for why people want competitive markets in the first place (squeezing out all inefficient waste to "efficiently" produce products at the bare minimum cost of production). And yes, I think "market solutions" are a fine way to produce "hell on earth". "Profit" is a measure of inefficiency in markets, since it indicates the same product could have been sold cheaper (without the profit margins)
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However it is not true that IBM is a monopoly, it is an economy of scale that is successful in its niche.
In other words, IBM is protected from competition by high barriers to entry (which include "economies of scale"), allowing it to the 9th most profitable corporation in the US according to Forbe's 2012 rankings. When competition is working, lots of other people would be interested in getting their chunk of that 9th most profitable spot (every investor with money in #10 and below), and would allocate their own investments to compete (hence drive down prices and profits) in the sector. However, barriers to ent
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What a pile of crap. IBM did in fact have several competitors in the 'mainframe' space - Amdahl, Hitachi, Fujitsu, etc. Throughout the 90's they all disappeared. Why would they do that - they had already crossed your magical 'barrier to entry'? Because they were approaching your 'ideal' state of 0 profit. IBM itself was suffering losses. So what did IBM do? They took a good look at themselves and tried to figure out 'what are we really good at, what is our value'. Then they sold off the pieces of th
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You also keep saying 'monopoly' like there is something wrong with being a monopoly - there is not.
Where do you see me saying this? You're the one making that inference. I'm using the word in its correct technical sense, to indicate that the "long term research" work of IBM correlates with breakdowns in idealized competitive free-market conditions.
In your world, the only meaning of 'competition' is offering the same thing at a lower price.
Or a better thing at the same price --- whatever it takes to undercut the competition while still making non-negative profits. I'm sticking to the plain technical sense of the word.
whereas your '0 profit' version of competition is of value to nobody.
'0 profit' is only directly detrimental to those who make money from profit, and
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Features that are smaller than the wavelength of the light you use to view them with aren't even debatable from a theorhethical standpoint.
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theorhethical
What's that? "Theological rhetorical ethics"? Damn, those humanities departments are getting completely out of control. No idea how you'd debate things from a theorhethical standpoint, but it sounds messy.
Anyway, from a theoretical standpoint, see my post above --- sub-wavelength structures are handy for holographic manipulation of light wavefronts. While there are diminishing returns from going way smaller than viewing light wavelengths (atomic scale would be overkill), control over feature scales in the l
The plot (Score:5, Funny)
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The capacitor then goes to the bathroom, leaks a bit, then goes back to the barman and asks for more.
Quantum Movie (Score:5, Funny)
Tragically, because the credits at the end tell you who the characters are, after seeing the movie you won't be able to know anything about what happened in it.
Re:The plot (Score:5, Funny)
A tachyon walks out of a bar.
The bar tender says "We don't serve your kind here"
A tachyon walks in to a bar.
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Your joke goes extremely well with your signature.
Thanks for the laugh.
Nice. A new art form. (Score:3)
"Atomation"
I can't wait for the sequel.
Quantum Sequel (Score:4, Funny)
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"Atomation 2: Quantum Boogaloo"?
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Direct Link (Score:3)
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/40970.wss [ibm.com]
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
First interesting comment... (Score:3)
Atom jokes are fine, but the parent is the first interesting or informative comment on the whole thread.
The "making of" linked at the end of the movie is well made and stimulating. I particularly liked this comment from the director of the project:
"If I can do this and I can get a thousand kids join science, rather than go to law school, I would be super happy".
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I believe those are actually a visualization of the atoms' electrons moving across the copper surface... you can see constructive and destructive destruction of the waves around the boy. If you look at this stm image ( http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us-flinte/stm16.jpg [ibm.com] ), the bottom right image shows the wave function of electrons completely trapped inside the circle of atoms.
Remember, this is scanning tunneling microscopy, so the electrons are not actually going in and out of the plane..
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I'd guess it's the density of the substrate electrons, disturbed by the atoms.
Atoms of what!? (Score:1)
Atoms of what!? Oh, not atoms at all, but molecules of Carbon Monoxide (CO), which I technically still comprised of atoms, just not on their own.
See the video 'Moving Atoms: Making The World's Smallest Movie' at 1:42 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xA4QWwaweWA#!)
Marketing FTW!!
Although they still get their message across.
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It does seem a bit funny to emphasize moving "individual atoms" when they are really molecules. I think manipulating a two element molecule is just as impressive, but why not just say that so as to be correct?
The first thing that struck me while watching the video is that many of the "atoms" appear to be a pair of dots, although one is much less prominent. I would have expected an atom to appear as a single dot. They say that you can only see the oxygen atoms, that the carbon atoms are "off screen". I wond
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The Goggles! They do Nothing!
And the sequel will be a reboot (Score:5, Funny)
A big bang, if you will.
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Re:What a waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to science. You are experimenting on a new method of doing something, you got some success, however you need more testing, you might as well have some fun while doing it. Drawing a series of pictures are just about as productive as drawing grids or some other pattern. Besides that after effect is a cute little movie to explain the technology they are doing.
We need more support for these type of things, and less of the bean counter mentality who assumes just because the research isn't obviously monetizable that it is useless.
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I bet they discovered something or at least increased their comprehension of moving molecules around. The goal is molecular-scale data storage, not screwing around.
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Seems that they are well on their way. It may only be a bit array, but that definitely was a bitmap image stored in the making of the movie.
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Yeah, it's not like people screwing around with impractical technology at IBM ever produced anything useful, like inventing the scanning-tunneling microscope [wikipedia.org].
big deal (Score:2)
Still a better love story... (Score:3)
...than Twilight. And that copper atom blows Kristen Stewart away as an actress.
Awesome news (Score:2)
What this demonstrates is a manufacturing method for producing nanoscale machinery. The concept is, with a series of simple experiments conducted in many labs, enough data is obtained to create an accurate nanoscale design simulation. (many of this experiments have been done already). You would then design a set of nanoscale machine parts - sensors, motors, gears, and so on in the software then create prototypes very laboriously and at very high cost using a tool like this microscope at IBM.
Once you have
The real inspiration (Score:2)
Stupid Article (Score:1)
Next up (Score:2)
Rom is going to make a movie out of Quark's
I hope he got the Holosuite customers to sign the disclaimer forms
Maybe im just a bit cynical.. (Score:2)
but, you do realize that IBM have basically turned this into another one of those pointless corporate advertisements that you might see on TV? ..like the GE jet engine adverts..or the siemens ones with spaceX mentioned.. you know, things the average consumer buys..
this is one of those.
neat 'science' tho!