I think I'm going to build this with my kids. What better way to show them atoms than to actually make them build a microscope that shows you the things directly?
Laser confocal microscope seems to be a little more relatable/less abstract (um vs nanometer scale).
But its not showing things directly, is it? Its interpreting a frequency and converting that to an image. Is it really that different to a music visualiser?
Imagine you were born deaf and couldn't hear music. But that someone showed you a music visualiser.
Do you think if you were watching the output of that visualiser you would now know the music in some meaningful way?
You seem really hung up on some pedantry about "see" and "seeing". Why? This may seem like some kind of strong criticism to you, but it just seems as though you are unaware of these technologies and haven't really thought through what constitutes a measurement or observation.
Consider foveated vision. The idea that you can actually see what is going on on your desk all at the same time is an illusion.
Of course a STM does not work with visible light so it's pretty damn obvious that any measurements will use some other mechanism, and will have to have their measurements converted into an image that we can see. But that does not mean we are not observing. As opposed to reading about someone else's observations.
I take it you also believe that quasars have not been observed and ditto for the dark side of the moon?
I don't understand the downvotes. That's an honest fundamental question.
It's not "showing things directly" because it can't. The limit of what you can see with light is proportional to the wavelength of the light (this is called the diffraction limit). For visible light and lens-based optics that's around 1/2 micron.
The distance between the atoms in that graphite is ~3 angstroms, that about 2000 times smaller than the diffraction limit for visible light.
You CAN get atomic resolution with a transmission electron microscope. Instead of light it uses electrons and has a far finer diffraction limit that visible light. Instead of lenses it uses electrostatic deflection.
Because the comment is factually wrong. Because it tries to argue something in bad faith.
> That's an honest fundamental question.
But it wasn't a question, it was a statement, and a faulty one at that.
Best case interpretation would require substituting 'current' for 'frequency' and even then it would be inaccurate because the current is a proxy for the Z-distance to the tip which is then used to convert to a 3D map, which in turn can be visualized.
It is fairly obvious that this is an indirect process so clear the word 'directly' wasn't about 'seeing atoms' but all about the fact that you can make the observations yourself.
Whether you are measuring a current or looking through an eyepiece both are observations. And looking at the resulting image is also an observation.
As opposed to reading about STMs and looking at pretty pictures online or in books.
It's a shallow comment masquerading as an insightful one, the worst way to derail any conversation.