First Image EVER of the Hydrogen Atom!

reply to post by TheNewRevolution

My assumption would be.. it would be done in a vacuum room, with said atoms floating around, and shooting laser at it. Since laser(photons) is actually less than an atom, it should image all the atom, and all the examiner has to do was to isolate one and take a picture.

reply to post by Morgil


And What have the Romans done for us?

All right, Stan. Don't labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return?
Xerxes:
The aqueduct.
Reg:
Oh yeah, yeah they gave us that. Yeah. That's true.
Masked Activist:
And the sanitation!
Stan:
Oh yes... sanitation, Reg, you remember what the city used to be like.
Reg:
All right, I'll grant you that the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done...
Matthias:
And the roads...
Reg:
(sharply) Well yes obviously the roads... the roads go without saying. But apart from the aqueduct, the sanitation and the roads...
Another Masked Activist:
Irrigation...
Other Masked Voices:
Medicine... Education... Health...
Reg:
Yes... all right, fair enough...
Activist Near Front:
And the wine...
Omnes:
Oh yes! True!
Francis:
Yeah. That's something we'd really miss if the Romans left, Reg.
Masked Activist at Back:
Public baths!
Stan:
And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now.
Francis:
Yes, they certainly know how to keep order... (general nodding)... let's face it, they're the only ones who could in a place like this.

(more general murmurs of agreement)
Reg:
All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?
Xerxes:
Brought peace!
Reg:
(very angry, he's not having a good meeting at all) What!? Oh... (scornfully) Peace, yes... shut up!

Originally posted by Sandalphon
This is sort of what I've been waiting for.

The hydrogen image looks a lot like what I drew of what an oxygen atom might look like.

Like the two layers of skins around the inside sphere. Well in my hypothetical model, one of those skins is a boson, which isn't quite a particle but it becomes one when something is in it. Except in the oxygen drawing at my house, there were 8 little spheres inside the two layers.

They are really like frogs eggs. Except notice the two dark "fish" shapes in the hydrogen model. One goes one way, the other goes the other way. I never expected two of them in a hydrogen model; I thought it was one "fish" shape per little sphere, which is the electron. Those fish shapes, they might be trapped micro black holes. Don't they look like a yin yang symbol?

The gentle way to put it is "don't give up your day job, please".

The shapes involved don't arise out of 'fish' or 'black holes' but consequences of solving partial differential equations. The size is not arbitrary either but governed by fundamental physical constants.

(BTW multi-electron atoms can't easily be imagined or solved without numerical techniques).

Originally posted by mulder85
Amazing to ponder that the red area in the center could actually be a tiny black hole. However, one thing I don't quite understand about the "atoms-are-actually-galaxies" philosophy/theory is how to reconcile the physics we observe at the quantum level with the physics we observe in the cosmos. Why don't celestial objects get entangled, for example? Or do they?

The way to resolve this is to understand that atoms-are-most-definitely-not-actually-galaxies because other than a general central potential and conservation of angular momentum resulting in vaguely similar shapes, there is no particular relationship any more than a rock is an orange.

Originally posted by mbkennel

The way to resolve this is to understand that atoms-are-most-definitely-not-actually-galaxies because other than a general central potential and conservation of angular momentum resulting in vaguely similar shapes, there is no particular relationship any more than a rock is an orange.

I wouldn't be so sure of that....while I would agree with your statement that they are most defiantly not galaxies, and I think your response certainly appropriate for the question posed, they have more incommon than you might think.

It is highly likely that galaxies are formed from as a function of electromagnetic fields and rotation and by the natural actions of charged particles in open space, this is being demonstrated by plank and the evidence is mounting, quickly. I am not educated in the quantum as much as I should be to make this statement( and we will set the actions of the Strong nuclear and Weak nuclear aside for this statement), but, alot of the structure and properties of atoms are electrical in nature. Black holes are not necessary for atoms, nor are they necessary for galaxies.

I think alot of people are thinking that some guy put some "stuff" on a slide and put it under some kind of microscope and took a picture with a digital camera....this is not the process that was used.

It would be more akin to standing 100 yards away from a small rock, and taking a laser pen, and flashing it at it so you can observe the area that the laser illuminated, its small, and fuzzy, but if you did this a few thousand times you could put an "image" together.

As to people talking about the wave function collapsing, correct me if Im wrong, but it's not the observation that causes the collapse, it's the intent of consciousness. I believe this has been demonstrated in a few experiments involving lots of shielded boxes, some funky hats, and a few lasers. I can't recall thier actual names or the institutions but Im pretty sure its been shown by multiple sources the intent causes the collapse, not the act of a device measuring something.

Originally posted by XaniMatriX
Next thing they will see is a galaxy.

Isaac Asimov put it in words better then anyone else I know, the deeper we look into our self's, the more of the universe we would see that surrounds us.

Basically he had the idea that, if were to create a microscope strong enough to see an atom, then we would see a star, and planets revolving around it.

I don't think he actually believed that, but was speculating on that first depiction of an atom's influence:

The picture that nearly everybody has in mind of an atom is of an electron or two flying around a nucleus, like planets orbiting a sun. This image was created in 1904, based on little more than clever guesswork, by a Japanese physicist named Hantaro Nagaoka. It is completely wrong, but durable just the same. As Isaac Asimov liked to note, it inspired generations of science fiction writers to create stories of worlds within worlds, in which atoms become tiny inhabited solar systems or our solar system turns out to be merely a mote in some much larger scheme.

And here's an explanation of the true structure of the atom - note how Bryson predicted it would look:

(and btw, if you haven't read Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything", it is very well worth the read)

Finally, in 1926, Heisenberg came up with a celebrated compromise, producing a new discipline that came to be known as quantum mechanics. At the heart of it was Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that the electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves. The uncertainty around which the theory is built is that we can know the path an electron takes as it moves through a space or we can know where it is at a given instant, but we cannot know both.22 Any attempt to measure one will unavoidably disturb the other. This isn’t a matter of simply needing more precise instruments; it is an immutable property of the universe.

What this means in practice is that you can never predict where an electron will be at any given moment. You can only list its probability of being there. In a sense, as Dennis Overbye has put it, an electron doesn’t exist until it is observed. Or, put slightly differently, until it is observed an electron must be regarded as being “at once everywhere and nowhere.”

If this seems confusing, you may take some comfort in knowing that it was confusing to physicists, too. Overbye notes: “Bohr once commented that a person who wasn’t outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn’t understand what had been said.” Heisenberg, when asked how one could envision an atom, replied: “Don’t try.”

So the atom turned out to be quite unlike the image that most people had created. The electron doesn’t fly around the nucleus like a planet around its sun, but instead takes on the more amorphous aspect of a cloud. The “shell” of an atom isn’t some hard shiny casing, as illustrations sometimes encourage us to suppose, but simply the outermost of these fuzzy electron clouds. The cloud itself is essentially just a zone of statistical probability marking the area beyond which the electron only very seldom strays. Thus an atom, if you could see it, would look more like a very fuzzy tennis ball than a hard-edged metallic sphere (but not much like either or, indeed, like anything you’ve ever seen; we are, after all, dealing here with a world very different from the one we see around us).

en.convdocs.org...

Originally posted by TheNewRevolution
Here is what I don't understand - and someone please enlighten me so I can if I am way off base.

All things are made up of atoms. Millions and billions and trillions of atoms.

Assuming this to be true, how would any microscope be able to single out one single atom. Would it not also pick up all the atoms around it? The air? The lens? The glass frame? The base? The objects beneath the atom?

If this atom was able to be singled out away from all other existent object, shouldn't this be a greater feat than simply viewing it?

They would take some hydrogen gas, place it in a magnetic field, then fire fixed amounts of high energy photons at the atoms, which if any luck would send one atom shooting out, where it could be manipulated by magnetic fields surrounding a vacuum chamber.

phys.org...

A similar high-school Physics lab experiment is known as the "Millikan oil-drop experiment". From this experiment using only aerosol sized droplets of oil, a microscope and some electrodes to create an electric field, scientists were able to deduce the fundamental unit of charge of an electron.

en.wikipedia.org...

I know nothing about physics. Could someone smarter than me tell me if this solves the measurement paradox that I've heard so much about? That you can't measure a atoms mass and location at the same time, or something close to that.

Originally posted by riffraff
I know nothing about physics. Could someone smarter than me tell me if this solves the measurement paradox that I've heard so much about? That you can't measure a atoms mass and location at the same time, or something close to that.

I think that is indirectly up for debate, the experiment itself does not answer that question in any direct or measurable way:

As to people talking about the wave function collapsing, correct me if Im wrong, but it's not the observation that causes the collapse, it's the intent of consciousness. I believe this has been demonstrated in a few experiments involving lots of shielded boxes, some funky hats, and a few lasers. I can't recall thier actual names or the institutions but Im pretty sure its been shown by multiple sources the intent causes the collapse, not the act of a device measuring something.

To put it another way, if you have person on a merry go round that is in motion, and you take a picture, you can't say "see this is what it looks like" because thats only the case for the object at a particular moment in time....when you go to the qauntum level its even more complicated because the person on the merry go round can suddenly become someone else or change position reguardless of inertia etc....perhaps someone can decribe it better

The problem is capturing the existence of that which is the very media of what is being used in the attempt to capture.

The electron is not a particle traveling on the wave, it is the material that makes up the wave. The wave is a vibration traveling across a fabric made up of electron strands.

This is what I see in this photo.

Originally posted by stormcell
Those pictures correspond to spherical harmonic waveforms:

That is pretty awesome if you ask me. I decided to do a little research into spherical harmonics and stumbled across a great article on how they are used in game lighting:

Spherical Harmonics (SH) are a data representation, nothing more. But like a Fourier transform, the SH data transformation has been allowing incredible images to be produced in a fraction of the time and with massive data sets – that only a few years ago seemed impossible. We explain SH and the amazing way Weta Digital in particular is pushing their use in production rendering. Spherical Harmonics representations are used extensively in various fields. They are a basis that is restricted to the sphere, as the name would suggest. They have been used to solve problems in physics, such as in heat equations, the gravitational and electric fields. They have also been used in quantum chemistry and physics to model the electron configuration in atoms.

www.fxguide.com...

It seems this spherical harmonics stuff can just about explain everything... heat, gravity, electric fields, atomic models, and now game lighting. The fact that spherical harmonics can be best defined as "data representation" just seems to give more credit to the simulated reality theory.

Originally posted by ChaoticOrder
www.fxguide.com...

It seems this spherical harmonics stuff can just about explain everything... heat, gravity, electric fields, atomic models, and now game lighting. The fact that spherical harmonics can be best defined as "data representation" just seems to give more credit to the simulated reality theory.


Spherical harmonics can't "just about explain everything". And there's no relation to 'simulated reality theory'.

Spherical harmonics are useful basis functions for parameterizing angular dependence of functions in spherical geometries. Just as sines and cosines are useful basis functions for parameterizing periodic functions in on the line.

I would approach the issue like a basic matter of measuring voltage. The higher the impedance of the instrument, the less interference with the circuit,

Ideally, however they are capturing this image, the less interference the better. Don't shoot anything at the surface, but collect data with the least draw, as sensitively as possible. That is the key to good instrumentation technique.

I imagine the people who have succeeded at this level are aware of this.

reply to post by mbkennel

Spherical harmonics are useful basis functions for parameterizing angular dependence of functions in spherical geometries. Just as sines and cosines are useful basis functions for parameterizing periodic functions in on the line.

And how does anything you said nullify their apparent application in a wide range of real world physics problems? The framework of reality is mathematics, so much so that particles can be expressed as a wave function. Physics is nothing but a matter of finding which equations match the reality we live in, and it seems to me that these spherical harmonic functions can explain a lot.