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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
08/31/09
08/31/09
Over these eight decades, despite all that science and technology have produced, the world is no closer to understanding how electrons move about the atomic space than it was eighty years ago.
The situation in atomic physics is something like that of Ptolemaic astronomy whose mathematics worked well enough for eighteen hundred years to satisfy people that the Sun orbited the earth; until Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo showed that it was the other way around.
I’m one of those who believe that QM is not the whole story and that by finding the right analog model a better understanding of the atom is possible.
I have one such offering – a long running artwork I call "Portrait of an Atom". See:
[www.snelsonatom.com]
and:
[www.kennethsnelson.net]
08/30/09
I agree with your thoughts about color not existing at the molecular level, but I question the limitations you place on the idea of a photographs. After all, any image created by a sensor that records spatial data due to interactions with the sensor can be (in my opinion) called a photograph. Yes, photo from Greek meaning light, but we have plenty of images that are created from stimuli to which the visual system is not sensitive and yet we still call them photographs. What'd think?
--Bob
08/30/09
1.It's black and white because it is not a photo.
2.Molecules are not black and white. If you were able to detect photons coming from molecules, you would be able to see color. Molecules absorb and emit photons. Photons carry a particular wavelength.
Geez... Is it a Yankee school of science? IBM?
08/28/09
An AFM isn't like an electron microscope, it is much closer to a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). IBM-Zurich's involvement here isn't surprising. They did develop the STM in 1981 (winning Binning and Rohrer the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986) and have continued to be a leader in scanning microscopies. Binning actually was involved in the development of the AFM.
Those would be molecular bonds, not atomic bonds.
The b&w image is not an "image" of the molecule. It is the data obtained from the deflection of the AFM tip (it's where the laser comes into all of this). Since they were 0.5 nm above the surface, they were likely operating in what everyone refers to as non-contact mode, so we are looking at tip deflection caused by changes in the local electronic structure near the tip. Given the 20 hour acquisition time, this is probably a composite of several hundred data acquisitions.
The IBM press release stupidly talks about "looking through the electron cloud" when everything the AFM tip is interacting with is the electron cloud.
Why the use of scare quotes around ultrahigh vacuum? Ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) refers to a pressure range of about 10^-9 torr to ~10^-12 torr. It's necessary to do almost anything on/with a chemically clean reactive surface. Google UHV and you'll find lots of pictures of shiny stainless steel equipment (often covered in aluminum foil).
And while this is some beautiful work by IBM, it's not the first time people have imaged internal structure of molecules (though it might be the first time someone has done it with AFM). There isn't anything surprising in this data. The last couple of paragraphs probably oversell the importance of this paper.
-Before people jump down my throat: Yes, I have worked with UHV systems for years and I've occasionally spent more hours than I would like to remember staring at STM and AFM data and arguing over the proper interpretation of the data with respect to data/interpretations from multiple other surface science techniques.
08/27/09
They don't? Then where does color come from?
Why wouldn't gold atoms be golden?
08/27/09
But on the molecular level, the atoms and molecules themselves have no color -- they don't reflect "light", they reflect or absorb individual photons. Think of it as being the difference between a pixel and an image.
The photo above isn't really a "photo" at all -- it's a visual representation of non-visual data, in this case, the data recorded by the needle about where it is being stopped by whatever is underneath it. Add up all the distances, and you get a 3-d model -- or if you assign shades of light/dark to the relative heights, a black and white picture like this. It's sort of like those things that are made up of a ton of little wires, and you press your hand into it to get a 3-d "image" or your hand.
08/27/09
08/27/09
Case in point: Let's say we DO have a quantum computer in a few years.
Quantum computers (QC's)are said to be an order of magnitude in computing power that will unleash incredible AI devices, talking computers etc...
We do have, not one but several supercomputers around that would equal what QC chip would do.
Yet, do not see true AI anytime soon.
The key: Programming.
I DO see QC being so small and using so much less power that, yes, one day we may have a laptop as thin as a sheet of paper, or a phone in a paper clip, so long as the way we humans interact with them makes sense...
So, although you might have some day a QC with the power of a Core i7 in a pin's head, it will still be an i7 in power, not a God sent do-it-all chip, and it will be subject to all the same programming problem we see today.
08/27/09
You've got it kind of wrong. Normal computers can only solve certain types of problems. They operate in a deterministic and ordered pattern to arrive at an end result the programmer has told the system how to compute.
There are in fact, certain examples of problems that a normal computer cannot solve. For instance, factoring on a normal computer is an exponential process. There are tricks to bring it down, but its the whole reason encryption as we have it now: the time to brute force the factorization would take longer than the age of the universe.
Quantum computers are specialized computers (and YES they HAVE been built already, albeit they are very unstable and only stay in sync for a matter of minutes and are only in the order of 1-4 qubits) that can make all of the calculations that the normal computer above would make ALL in PARALLEL, arriving at a solution in polynomial time.
These are not meant to be computers on your lap, at least for not another 50-100 years. These are specialized systems doing specialized jobs, just like the first modern computers were doing in the 1950's.
08/27/09
08/29/09
To all of ya:
I KNOW what quantum computer will do... the 0, 1 and the 01 or 10 due to the duality of quantum states that the answer yield.
I know all that.
Please everyone realize that when and if we get to manufacture a QC chip, it will not be in the 200+ million transistor range that the latest CPU's, GPU's, and GPGPU's are built nowadays.
The will be the equivalent of a Z80 or a PIC processor to start.
Even though it might hace the POTENCIAL to make any of today's chips obsolete by the sheer number of flops it will able to compute (That is all the possibilities within the quantum state of answers), it will only be as good as a program can take advantage of it.
Imagine of someone giving you a freshly made PC without any OS.
Is it any good? NO. It's useless until you load an OS and program to something with it.
Even though any supercomputer currently used in the world HAS the potencial to become a very convincing human and have a compeling AI than no one could discern from while talking to... the best AI programs today, fail misserably.
SO even though you have incredible untapped power in a QC, it will only be as good as the program the runs it.
That is the point i'm trying to make.
:)
08/27/09
i read: future engineers will make replicators like in star trek (hopefully not like in star gate).
i want: now.
08/27/09
08/27/09
08/27/09
08/27/09
LOOK! I HAZ SCIENCE!
08/27/09
Talk about a Star Trek moment.
08/27/09
Now seriously: wow!
08/27/09
08/27/09
Seriously, though, it sounds like this is one of those bits of tech news that will be forgotten about, but will have wide ranging consequences in tech advancement.
08/27/09
08/27/09
08/27/09
08/27/09
08/27/09