If there is something complex in this world – not to speculate the impossible – it is the fact that the human eye can perceive a tiny portion of matter that for centuries was considered the last link (until the subatomic world emerged): the atom. The photography of David Nadlinger, from the University of Oxford, has achieved the inconceivable: allowing us to explore the figure of a microscopic positively charged strontium atom, suspended between electric fields.
The atom managed to become evident by shooting it with laser light, so that it could be captured through the window of a vacuum chamber.
When illuminated by a laser with the correct blue-violet color ratio, the atom absorbs and re-emits light particles fast enough to be captured by an ordinary camera in a long-exposure photograph. The idea of being able to see a single atom with the naked eye seemed like a wonderfully direct and visceral bridge between the tiny quantum world and our macroscopic reality.
A pale blue dot floating in space – and what cosmo observers like Carl have claimed is also the Earth; a particle of blue dust around a star among billions more – that might not capture our interest at first glance but still contains literally everything we know.
It is fascinating to reflect from this point: the fact that we are not capable, as humanity, of conceiving the spatial dimensions of matter that is outside our optical reach – the immensity of the planet, of the universe, and perhaps of the multiverse, and then landing in an atom. Because while it is true, we are condemned to limit ourselves by our senses and our sense of belonging to an already agreed-upon reality, the one you know until now.
Nadlinger’s photograph, which he titled Single Atom In An Ion Trap, was captured in a laboratory at Oxford University, using an ordinary digital camera. This is the first photo that allows man to visualize the atom from his seat. A undoubtedly novel advance, which invites us to speculate about the near possibility of beginning to look at our reality from those other perspectives that wonderful universes await.