In 1839, Louis Daguerre aimed his camera at the Boulevard du Temple in Paris and made an exposure of at least 7 minutes. He produced a lovely photograph, or really a daguerreotype:
Boulevard du Temple, Paris, 1839
The street and sidewalks must have been fairly busy, but because the exposure had to be so long, it all blends away, so we miss almost all of the activity.
Almost.
One pair of Parisians did remain still long enough to be captured. We can see them if we zoom in at the lower left:
The man who appears to be having his shoes shined is easy to spot, and the person shining his shoes can be roughly made out as well. This pair could not have known it at the time, but they are the first human beings ever to be photographed.
If we humans last another billion years, they still will be. I don’t know who they are, but I feel a deep kinship across the years with them, much like I feel with those who made cave paintings millenia ago: Look! There were people here.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of this photograph when the news came out yesterday (January 17) that the first pair of atoms had been caught on film bonding and unbonding. A pair of unwitting rhenium atoms, just doing their thing.
Leading the research was this pair:
…of the University of Nottingham (UK) and the University of Ulm (Germany), respectively
According to Khlobystov,
To our knowledge, this is the first time when bond evolution, breaking and formation was recorded on film at the atomic scale.
In the film, two rhenium atoms appear as large dark circles, captured with transmission electron microscopy. They are inside a carbon nanotube, a model of which looks like this:
just a lot of carbon atoms bonded together
What we will see here is that pair of rhenium atoms, inside the nanotube, already bonded together to form a dirhenium molecule. They come to the edge of the nanotube and escape out of a crack in its structure. They then roll down the side of the nanotube and into the space between it and another nanotube. All the while, they bond and unbond. The authors say we can tell whether it is a single, double, or quadruple bond by its length, and each of those states happens in the video. We also see times when the two atoms are not bonded at all.
And so, without further ado, the first-ever film of atoms forming a bond to become a molecule:
You can see them in various stages of closeness and also apart. Two atoms bonding and unbonding, and you’re one of the first people on earth ever to actually witness that.
