You’re thinking of what’s called the Abbe diffraction limit. It doesn’t apply in this case because the atom is being made to fluoresce. The long exposure required is because the amount of light the single atom can emit is too dim for the naked eye to register in real time. The principle, however, is the same as seeing the gas in a florescent light bulb, with the only difference that the current is a laser beam instead of electricity between two electrodes. If you really want to split hairs about it then no, you can’t see it in the sense that you see light scattered off a surface. But you’re not seeing the surface in that case either, you’re only seeing the visible light it failed to absorb. Ultimately you’re never going to directly see anything, only the light interacting with the thing.
That the light you see here fluoresces instead of refracts makes it no less real that you’re seeing the atom insofar as you can ever see anything, i.e. by the light it refracts or emits. I think most people consider apprehending the gas in a fluorescent bulb to be seeing it.
Edited for forgetting my manners. You’re asking questions and that’s good; it presents opportunity for discussion.
I recall reading that one could see atoms by placing a glow-in-the-dark clock in a completely dark room, then look at the clock through a magnifying glass. One would see the light emanating from the individual atoms as they radiated? fell off of? the clock’s hands. I may not be remembering this correctly, it was about 40 years ago. I do remember that I couldn’t get it to work (i.e. I didn’t see anything besides a magnified clock).
But the book, at the time, was already 10 or 20 years old (got it from the library) so maybe, when it was published, they still painted clocks with radon paint, or something else brighter than phosphorous.
No, forceblink dispatched that one way upthread, and we moved on.
No, not really.
Let’s say I had enough power to light up your regular sized fluorescent bulb so that it made an incredibly bright glow, and then I ran around the state of New Jersey with it while you took a really long exposure photo from geostationary orbit. I don’t think we’d convince anyone that our photo of a bright smudge where New Jersey should be counts as an image of the bulb.
In this comment you’re suggesting it’s bullshit (I assume you mean fake) because of the diffraction limit. Now you seem to have switched to arguing it’s just too dim. Well, it’s too dim for the naked eye to see directly, which is why the camera captures a long exposure. That has nothing to do with wavelength. And the light that makes the picture still comes from the strontium atom fluorescing (emitting its own light).
Are you perhaps confusing wavelength with amplitude? Because the amplitude is too low for the naked human eye to see in real time. The article is completely up front about that and explains the camera makes it visible with a long exposure. It’s a photography competition, not a naked eye competition. What part of the experiment do you consider bullshit?
