Imaging them at an atomic level.
When I took chemistry, I always wondered if the structural diagrams that chemists came up with were accurate depictions, or just a conceptual model. Now we know.
3 thoughts on “Molecular Bonds”
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Imaging them at an atomic level.
When I took chemistry, I always wondered if the structural diagrams that chemists came up with were accurate depictions, or just a conceptual model. Now we know.
Comments are closed.
It’s interesting seeing exactly how regular the shapes are in the one structure compared to how the products are distorted. Now I’m curious how accurately this matches the actual predicted structure — as opposed to the simplified-for-sketching stick representation.
Atomic force balance microscopes are one of the many things that even the science fiction of my youth didn’t anticipate. I remember learning in my early science classes that we would never be able to see an atom. I try to keep that in mind when I am making an engineering judgement about whether something is or is not possible…
Even just a decade ago I had to point to someone that it was indeed possible to image atoms using AFM for quite some time already. I remembered reading about it as a kid. They thought the best imaging technology was the electron microscope. Heh. Still this is the first time I have seen molecular bonds imaged so accurately.
One interesting medical scanning technology which is still not widespread is Optical Coherence Tomography. It has a lot of potential since it allows the visualization of flesh in vivo at a high resolution in a way not possible with other techniques.