Word: atomically
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Seitz said he first "suggested the idea of making diamond crystals out of just one kind of atom and thus improving heat conduction" in 1972, while working as a research associate with Nobel prize-winning Professor Nicolaas Bloembergen at Harvard's Gordon McKay Laboratory...
...just as quantum physicists have revealed that the world inside the atom -- with its whizzing elementary particles and clouds of electrons -- is just as grand as the big, blooming universe outside, artists who construct a magnum opus out of the microscopic have become major-leaguers...
...principle behind all this precision comes from quantum physics. When an atom is bombarded with electromagnetic radiation -- in this case microwaves -- it shifts into a new energy state. Each type of atom responds most readily to a particular frequency. For the cesium-133 atoms in most atomic clocks, the frequency is 9,192,631,770 vibrations per second. When a microwave beam inside the clock is set to that frequency, the maximum number of atoms will undergo the energy switch, signaling the clock's internal computer that the device is correctly tuned. The vibrating microwaves keep time; the atoms just...
They are the best thing to happen to pure carbon since the diamond: 60-atom molecules that are neither pyramid shape (like diamonds) nor hexagonal (like graphite) but spherical, like soccer balls. Captured for the first time in 1991 in computer-generated "snapshots" (seen here with cesium-based handles -- the rabbit ears on top), these namesakes of Buckminster Fuller might someday be fashioned into tiny ball bearings, featherweight batteries or even superconducting wires that are just one molecule thick...
Such marvels, of course, will not materialize overnight. Cautions IBM physicist Donald Eigler: "The single-atom switch looks small until you realize it took a whole roomful of equipment to make it work." Still, computer chips the size of bacteria and motors as small as molecules of myosin are rapidly moving out of the world of fantasy and into the realm of possibility. "For years, scientists have been taking atoms and molecules apart in order to understand them," says futurist K. Eric Drexler, president of the Foresight Institute in Palo Alto, Calif. "Now it's time to start figuring...