A Boy And His Atom: IBM Creates the World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film With Atoms

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 1959A Boy And His Atom will be added to our collection of 525 Free Movies Online.

Related Content:

Richard Feynman Introduces the World to Nanotechnology with Two Seminal Lectures (1959 & 1984)

Stephen Fry Introduces the Strange New World of Nanoscience


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