🚨 DISCOVERY ALERT: Researchers discovered the most accurate image of an atom.
No camera captured this. No lens focused light onto a sensor and produced this image. Every single line radiating outward from that center is a reconstructed mathematical trajectory — the computed path of a subatomic particle reverse-engineered from thousands of sensor hits inside a cylindrical detector the size of a six-story building.
This is a collision event from the ATLAS detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Two protons, accelerated to 99.9999991% the speed of light in opposite directions, were allowed to meet at the center of that image. What you're seeing is the wreckage — hundreds of particles spraying outward in every direction, each track a fragment of the violence that occurs when matter is pushed past the boundary of its own coherence.
The reason this qualifies as the most accurate image of an atom is precisely because it was never taken — it was solved.
Every imaging technique before this era was fundamentally limited by the same problem: you need something smaller than the thing you're trying to see in order to see it. Optical microscopes hit a wall at the wavelength of visible light — roughly 400 nanometers. An atom is 0.1 nanometers. Light literally cannot resolve it. Electron microscopes pushed further, using electrons instead of photons, and produced those haunting lattice images of atomic arrangements on crystal surfaces. Scanning tunneling microscopes mapped electron density by measuring quantum tunneling currents across a needle tip one atom wide.
All of those techniques show you the neighborhood of an atom. The electron cloud. The surface probability distribution. The shape of where electrons are likely to be found.
None of them showed you what an atom does when you crack it open.
The Bohr model most people carry in their heads — a miniature solar system with a dense nucleus at the center and electrons orbiting in clean circular shells — was known to be wrong by 1926. Electrons don't orbit. They occupy probability clouds, smeared across space in mathematical distributions called orbitals, existing in superposition across their entire allowed region until an interaction forces them to manifest at a specific location. The nucleus sits at the center, impossibly dense, containing 99.97% of the atom's mass in a space roughly 100,000 times smaller than the atom itself.
If the atom were scaled to the size of a major sports stadium, the nucleus would be a marble sitting at the center of the pitch. The electrons would be specks of dust orbiting somewhere in the upper tiers. Everything in between — the vast interior of the stadium — would be completely empty.
The solidity of the chair you're sitting on, the floor beneath your feet, the device in your hand — none of it is solid in any meaningful physical sense. It is electric force fields and quantum exclusion principles maintaining their geometry so aggressively that macroscopic objects cannot pass through each other. Matter repels matter not because it is packed tight, but because the electromagnetic fields and the Pauli exclusion principle — which forbids two fermions from occupying the same quantum state — create an effective rigidity that our nervous systems interpret as hardness.
You have never touched anything in your life. Your fingertips have never made contact with any surface. They've been repelled at a distance of a few angstroms by electron clouds pushing back.
But even that picture stops at the atom's edge. The real frontier is what lives inside the nucleus itself — and that's where this image becomes extraordinary.
Those protons that collided in the center of this image were not simple objects. For a century after Rutherford discovered the nucleus, physicists treated protons and neutrons as fundamental particles. Elementary. Indivisible. The lowest level.
Quantum chromodynamics — the theory of the strong nuclear force developed through the 1960s and 70s — dismantled that assumption completely. Protons are made of quarks. Three of them, bound together by a field so powerful that it actually increases in strength as you try to pull quarks apart, unlike gravity or electromagnetism which weaken with distance. The strong force is the only fundamental force in nature that operates this way. Pull two quarks apart far enough and the energy you're pouring into the gap spontaneously converts into mass — producing new quark-antiquark pairs rather than ever allowing the original quarks to separate freely.
Quarks have never been observed in isolation. They can only exist in bound states. The moment you try to free one, the universe manufactures new quarks to replace it.
What this means is that a proton at rest is not really three quarks sitting in a bag. It's a seething, dynamic object — a constant churning of gluons mediating the strong force between quarks, virtual quark-antiquark pairs flickering in and out of existence in the quantum foam, the entire structure holding itself together through interactions so rapid and complex that they occur at timescales of 10⁻²⁴ seconds.
The tracks exploding outward in this image are the evidence of all of that released simultaneously. When two protons collide at near-light speed, the quarks and gluons inside them interact directly — and the energy of that collision materializes as new particles: pions, kaons, muons, photons, and occasionally far rarer things like Higgs bosons or top quarks, particles that exist for fractions of a femtosecond before decaying into cascades of lighter particles that the detector then captures.
Each colored line in this image is a different particle species. The curvature of each track — shaped by the superconducting magnets surrounding the detector — encodes the particle's momentum and charge. The length of each track encodes how far it traveled before decaying. Every single line is simultaneously a particle's biography and a window into what existed inside the nucleus for a sliver of time too short to have a name in human language.
Generations of scientists built their understanding of atomic structure through inference — measuring deflection angles, studying spectral lines, analyzing scattering patterns — because the thing they were studying could never be directly observed. The atom held its secrets inside a scale that human instruments couldn't reach.
What CERN built is an instrument that doesn't observe the atom passively. It obliterates it and reads the explosion.
The most accurate image of an atom looks nothing like an atom at all. It looks like a supernova captured in a single frame — a moment of total structural dissolution from which we reconstruct, mathematically, what was there before we destroyed it.
The deepest truth about matter is that we understand it best at the exact moment it ceases to exist.
🎬 Top 50 Greatest Korean Films of All Time
1. Memories of Murder
2. Parasite
3. Oldboy
4. The Handmaiden
5. Burning
6. Peppermint Candy
7. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
8. Poetry
9. Mother
10. The Housemaid (1960)
11. Oasis
12. Secret Sunshine
13. Joint Security Area
14. The Wailing
15. Thirst
16. I Saw the Devil
17. A Tale of Two Sisters
18. 3-Iron
19. Decision to Leave
20. A Bittersweet Life
21. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
22. Lady Vengeance
23. The Chaser
24. The Man from Nowhere
25. The Yellow Sea
26. New World
27. A Taxi Driver
28. 1987: When the Day Comes
29. The Host
30. Train to Busan
31. The Good, the Bad, the Weird
32. Snowpiercer
33. Save the Green Planet!
34. Breathless
35. The Age of Shadows
36. Veteran
37. Masquerade
38. The Attorney
39. Aimless Bullet
40. Seopyeonje
41. Chunhyang
42. Chi-hwa-seon (Painted Fire)
43. The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well
44. Right Now, Wrong Then
45. House of Hummingbird
46. Christmas in August
47. Castaway on the Moon
48. My Sassy Girl
49. Silenced
50. Okja
I will never forget reading that Quentin Tarantino cried profusely the first time he watched the Hong Kong movie Chungking Express.
Not because the 90s classic directed by Shanghai-born Wong Kar-wai recounts a tale of bleak and intransigent sadness.
Tarantino was weeping out of sheer joy - crying from a sense of inspiration and wonder at the endless possibilities of film-making as a modern art form.
This is one of my favourite scenes from the film.
I love showing it to younger guys, and telling them that this was the way the blades wooed the ladies and won hapless hearts during the Zhu Rongji and Wen Jiabao eras in China.
Before social media and smart phones - when we went carousing with nothing but wallets in our pockets, in the smoked filled bars of Lan Kwai Fong, the French Concession of Shanghai, and Sanlitun in Beijing.
https://t.co/cxM2fYflMZ
A lucky generation of kids grew up with Rik Mayall narrating stories on TV in his own manic style - many who rushed home from school to watch George’s Marvellous Medicine now borrow Rik’s voices when reading the same stories to their own children.
A 500-year-old shipwreck, the Bom Jesus, was discovered in Namibia’s desert during diamond mining. Inside were over 100 elephant tusks, 2,000 copper ingots, and Spanish and Portuguese gold coins valued at $13 million.
You can also use Nano Banana Pro to faithfully restore old and damaged photos, while at the same time upscaling to 4K.
Prompt: Faithfully restore this image with high fidelity to modern photograph quality, in full color, upscale to 4K
Graphene just broke a fundamental law of physics.
Its electrons just did something physicists thought was impossible. For nearly 200 years, metals have obeyed the Wiedemann-Franz law – the rule that electrical conductivity and thermal conductivity always rise and fall together.
But in ultra-clean graphene, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science found the opposite. As electrical conductivity increased, thermal conductivity dropped, shattering a principle taught in every physics textbook.
The key lies at the “Dirac point,” a strange electronic tipping point where graphene is neither a metal nor an insulator. Here, electrons stop behaving like individual particles. Instead, they flow collectively as a nearly perfect fluid – a state called a “Dirac fluid.”
This discovery doesn’t just rewrite the rules for graphene. It provides a tabletop window into extreme physics usually reserved for black holes and high-energy colliders. Scientists say this behavior could help probe mysteries of quantum entanglement, black hole thermodynamics, and the very fabric of matter itself.
["Universality in quantum critical flow of charge and heat in ultraclean graphene." Nature Physics, 2025]
For every retweet of this post, I will donate £1 to the @VC_and_GC_Assoc up to £50,000.
Time is running out following @I_W_M’s decision to close the Lord Ashcroft Gallery.
Visit while you still can, to honour the bravery of those who risked so much to protect our great nation.
A lesser known novel by the author of Frankenstein. “The Last Man” is a pandemic novel about “the last year of the world”. Rejected in its time it was out of print from 1833 to 1965. It features an antihero exploring the dead world and staying alive for the sake of a stray dog.
Witness 1st hand, the struggle,tears and anguish of a virginartist making its way into the world. Shade the Omnibus V1. Out now! Features a southern BBQ flavored forward by Peter. V2 will feature an extended afterward by Me slicing up the mad creative process! Its all okay now.😘
I think this AI Harry Potter series will be more popular than the HBO remake.
This Hogwarts vlog account has been up for two weeks, and it already has 15M views 🤯
You get slightly…different stories than the books, which is entertaining.