As a horse ran by, it broke the strings, tripped the shutters, and created a series of photos that amazed the world. Since then, faster and faster cameras have been developed. Science has developed a number of imaging techniques other than photography. Scanning probe microscopes, invented in the early 1980s, can zoom in and image individual atoms but essentially, they have been unable to record motion. LBL's new ultrafast scanning probe microscopes change that.
Events evolving at an atomic level often occur in lightning-like time frames.
The new microscopes finally give science the ability to observe these ephemeral events. They will capture moments that are measured in picoseconds, or trillionths of a second.