National Geographic: The Invisible World Page #3

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of several atoms

Colorized artificially to enhance

our view

atoms exhibit unpredicted movement

revealing that solid objects

when seen on an atomic scale

are actually a sea of moving particles

The level of magnification

of the movies

on the home TV screen is

about ten million,

maybe 20 million, depending on

the size of your TV set

That's about the equivalent to blowing

a basketball up

to the size of the Earth

The ability to see single atoms

to isolate them at that

could have considerable importance

Where it will lead is very

difficult to

except what we have is

a new technology

a new way of looking at

materials in the world

And every time you have a new way

of looking at things

you find out something new

We are exiled from other worlds

by time as well as by size

In a world of motion

there is infinite detail too fast

for the unaided eye

In the 1870s an ingenious photographer

Eadweard Muybridge

invented a way to record movements

normally too quick to be seen

A wager about the stride of

a running horse

brought Muybridge to the stock farm

of a wealthy Californian

With a battery of 24 cameras

that were activated by threads

stretched across a track

Muybridge captured aspects of motion

that had never been witnessed before

Muybridge's patron had bet that all

four legs of a running horse

were sometimes simultaneously

off the ground

Stop-action photography proved him

to be right

By projecting his photographs in

rapid succession

the first motion pictures were born

The movement of people as well

as animals became

for Muybridge a passionate

subject of study

Much more than just a

technical curiosity

Muybridge's pioneering work was the

first photographic analysis

of the dynamics of physical motion

Today, modern high-speed cameras

can record rapid motion

with a clarity that Eadweard Muybridge

could only have dreamed of

Slow-motion film is now

a commonplace tool

in analyzing athletic performance

For Dr. Gideon Ariel

a physical education expert

and a former discus thrower on the

Israeli Olympic team

slow-motion film is just the first

in the scientific coaching

of athletes

Dr. Ariel has turned to the computer

for aid in the analysis of movement

Slow-motion film of an athlete

is projected frame

by frame onto a recording screen

Each touch of a sonic pen transmits

into the computer memory

the dynamically changing positions

of the athlete's joints and limbs

Human movement is governed by

the same laws of motion

that apply to the entire

physical world

And from the visual information

contained in the film

the computer can rapidly calculate

the interrelationship of force

acceleration, and velocity in the

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