Seeing the unseeable
I don't often post about science here (though honestly, I don't know why), but the combination of two recent papers has me flabbergasted enough to make a conscious exception to that rule:
Imagining the connectivity of a single molecule (original article)- for all the astonishingly creative ways that we have to determine molecular structure, the feeling of looking at an image of an entire molecule's structure is... well, spooky. As a practicing chemist, I've accepted that at some level, our depictions of stiff chemical bonds and rigid molecular shapes are at best an abstraction, and not one that we'd ever be able to image up close; then suddenly, along comes a picture of the molecule, complete with even the hydrogen atoms. (article) At a glance, I'd say that it'll be limited to planar molecules on special substrates, usually without identifiying which atom is which. And of course, the speed of the technique would certainly preclude, say, studies of dynamics or conformational flexibility... but within those limits, it's very cool, and demonstrates the incredible imaging power of AFM.
And if that wasn't an insult enough to my calm acceptance of the abstract nature of the world, another group has in short order come along and imaged the electron density of a carbon atom- those pictures that chemistry students associate with the "s" and "p" orbitals, distributions usually derived only from abstract reasoning and intense, hard-core mathematical models of the universe. (paper accepted, doesn't appear to be accessible yet except as a press release)
...I could go on about sample preparation, limitations in these techniques, what it is we're actually seeing, or the issues involved with trying to hard to map our static physical conceptions onto the fluctuating weirdness that is the quantum world.
But instead, I'll just echo what many others are saying this week: I'd never imagined that this would be possible in my lifetime. But I'm beginning to understand why the public thinks that what we do is magic.
Imagining the connectivity of a single molecule (original article)- for all the astonishingly creative ways that we have to determine molecular structure, the feeling of looking at an image of an entire molecule's structure is... well, spooky. As a practicing chemist, I've accepted that at some level, our depictions of stiff chemical bonds and rigid molecular shapes are at best an abstraction, and not one that we'd ever be able to image up close; then suddenly, along comes a picture of the molecule, complete with even the hydrogen atoms. (article) At a glance, I'd say that it'll be limited to planar molecules on special substrates, usually without identifiying which atom is which. And of course, the speed of the technique would certainly preclude, say, studies of dynamics or conformational flexibility... but within those limits, it's very cool, and demonstrates the incredible imaging power of AFM.
And if that wasn't an insult enough to my calm acceptance of the abstract nature of the world, another group has in short order come along and imaged the electron density of a carbon atom- those pictures that chemistry students associate with the "s" and "p" orbitals, distributions usually derived only from abstract reasoning and intense, hard-core mathematical models of the universe. (paper accepted, doesn't appear to be accessible yet except as a press release)
...I could go on about sample preparation, limitations in these techniques, what it is we're actually seeing, or the issues involved with trying to hard to map our static physical conceptions onto the fluctuating weirdness that is the quantum world.
But instead, I'll just echo what many others are saying this week: I'd never imagined that this would be possible in my lifetime. But I'm beginning to understand why the public thinks that what we do is magic.