The World’s Smallest Movie: A Stop-Motion Animation of Individual Atoms
Animation is nothing more than arranging relatively stable things, taking a picture, and then moving and doing it again, frame by frame. Some artists use pen and ink, some clay, some real world objects. This creative team of IBM researchers decided to use atoms. Atoms!? A. toms.
Hyperallergic reports,
The world is obsessed with the “biggest” or “smallest” of anything, so … this work of nano-cinema holds the Guinness World Records record for the “World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film.” Created by IBM, this film is made with atoms, yes, atoms, and “IBM researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules (two atoms stacked on top of each other), all in pursuit of making a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times.”
To learn more about how it was done, check out this making-of featurette:
Chris
