Digital Data Close-Up

Why is the ability to measure magnetic forces useful? Well, sometimes, seeing is believing. And since you can’t see magnetism with your eyes directly, you need another way to sense it.

Which brings me to the hard drive image. In this image, you are looking at two rows of bits, which might be encoding a very small fraction of a document, song, or photo. The alternating red and blue stripes are the digital 1s and 0s. The colors represent the forces experienced by the lever: 0s attract the lever (blue), while 1s repel it (dark red). The cartoon shows the lever hovering above a hard drive sample, deflected by the magnetic bits.

Depending on what kind of file is represented by these bits, it might represent about 6 letters of text, 6 pixels of a photo, or 0.0002 seconds of a song.

Remember how I said that your hard drive contains billions of tiny magnetic regions? Well, to squeeze all those bits inside your computer, they have to be incredibly small. In fact, about 10 of these images could fit across the width of a human hair.

“Snapping” this image was an “aha” moment for me – I could clearly see how a hard drive stores information. But this kind of microscope can do more than look at today’s technologies. It can help us study new materials, testing them for magnetism. As tech devices are relentlessly miniaturized, it gets increasingly difficult to manipulate and predict material properties. What happens when one of these magnetic bits shrinks to the size of a single atom? Is it still magnetic? Microscopes like this one are powerful tools for finding the answers to questions like this.

While our five senses are impressive, they are much too coarse to capture the finest-grained details of our world. There is an entire other universe down at the microscopic level, one that often goes unnoticed or taken for granted. And it is just as marvelous.

Поиск по сайту: