Moving Atoms: Making The World's Smallest Movie

IBM · 3M views · 2013-04-30 · 4:56

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Overview

A short IBM behind-the-scenes documentary on how researchers moved individual atoms to make the world's smallest movie. It introduces the scientists and their work on atomic memory and data storage.

On Hacker News

HN commenters link it as the making-of companion to IBM's atom stop-motion film.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2014–2025

Topics

Hardware (other)Materials science Fundamental physics

What people said

mncharity · 2025-03 · Reference
> So what next? LLM discussion of visualizations? I did guerrilla usability testing around teaching scale, which included this video[1] (stop-motion animation using CO molecules). Lots of people asked "What are those ripples?". IBM even had a supplementary webpage addressing this (which I no longer see, even on archive). People could easily ask this with me standing beside them, but not so much if viewing the content online. Which raised the UI question of how to encourage such. With LLMs, perhaps people will be able to ask questions of a visualization? What is that? Why is that? What about ...? I don't understand ... Does this mean ...? [1] IBM's A boy and his atom [LINK] Making of: [VIDEO]
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gus_massa · 2019-03 · Reference
It's nice to see it again, but remember that this was done in (2013). More info: Wikipedia page: [LINK] How it was made: [VIDEO]
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ColinWright · 2014-11 · Reference
Submitted many times, and yet it never gets any discussion. The only comment on all the previous submissions (from a quick, desultory search) is this: ======== How it was made : [VIDEO] What are the ripples? : [LINK] ======== Similarly, it never seemed to get much attention, judging by the severe lack of up-votes. Here are the previous submissions I found (some deleted): [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]
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Sources

Video by IBM, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

Data and selection notes

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