If you didn’t catch this a while back when it made the rounds of the tech blogs, check it out because it’s still pretty amazing. It may be low on plot, but this cartoon, simply produced, is so small it had to be magnified 100 million times in order to be seen.
IBM scientists working on “atomic-level memory” moved individual carbon monoxide molecules one at a time to create each frame. Each do you see is a single molecule. How crazy is that?
The idea is that if this technique becomes viable, computer chips will be made with pathways only a single molecule thick. Even today’s smallest chips are thousands of times larger that that. We’re talking about making computers 10,000 times smaller than they are, or the same size computer 10,000 times more powerful. It’s insane.
And it all started with a cartoon.
