A Boy and His Atom: Watch The World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film
What you’re watching above isn’t your ordinary film. No, this film — A Boy and His Atom – holds the Guinness World Record for being the World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film. It’s literally a movie made with atoms, created by IBM nanophysicists who have “used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules, all in the pursuit of making a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times.” If you’re wondering what that means exactly, then I’d encourage you to watch the behind-the-scenes documentary below. It takes you right onto the set — or, rather into the laboratories — where IBM scientists reveal how they move 5,000 molecules around, creating a story frame by frame. As you watch the documentary, you’ll realize how far nanotechnology has come since Richard Feynman laid the conceptual foundations for the field in 1959.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.
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