Electron in Motion

Big news out of Sweden: they've used atto-second light pulses to "photograph" electrons for the first time. Now, you're going to get a lot of uninformed science stories about how these are the first pictures of an electron, but that's a lot of hooie. Pictures of stuff are the collection of photons on a macroscopic scale after they have interacted with a surface. These "pictures" of an electron are actually just the energy distribution of photons after interacting with an electron after having been stripped from an atom. The "new" stuff here, is using these incredibly short light-pulses to interact (or collide, although in quantum mechanics, nothing actually hits anything) with the electron, and then guide those pulses to a detector. Take a look at the atto-second light pulses on the detector:

Each dot of brightness in the picture represents the energy of an individual photon, but at least you can see the quantum nature of the energy levels (there are places that the photons just cannot appear), that a light wave is a three-dimensional object (well, four if you want to be really technical), and that the electron interaction has added patches of cyclical brightness with its own frequency (these atto-second pulses come from a laser, so they should all have the same energy or brightness). Very cool.