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The first video of individual atoms bonding and breaking

inverse.com

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Re: The first video of individual atoms bonding and breaking

#11
I remember in an intro bio class we were shown simulated animations of how reactions occur. For example it depicted molecules floating perfectly and almost intently into an enzyme demonstrating the lock and key model.

The teacher made it point that the animations were not realistic in the sense that there should be a lot more stuff flying around. And a lot more denser and faster otherwise reactions simply wouldn't occur. But that chaos isn't educational to visualize.

So I guess my question is why does it look so neat in this real life video?

Re: The first video of individual atoms bonding and breaking

#12
post #11

I remember in an intro bio class we were shown simulated animations of how reactions occur. For example it depicted molecules floating perfectly and almost intently into an enzyme demonstrating the lock and key model. The teacher made it point that the animations were not realistic in the sense that there should be a lot more stuff flying around. And a lot more denser and faster otherwise reactions simply wouldn't oc…

It looks so neat because you're looking at two atoms carefully placed on carbon nanotubes

Re: The first video of individual atoms bonding and breaking

#13
Wow this is really exciting to watch.

Seeing the atoms jump around reminded me that at that scale things don't have definite locations like we'd intuitively expect. It is probably an artifact of the recording though, and not really related to the uncertainty principle. Could we double the framerate to see the intermediate positions?

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