Two very cool experiments at the atomic level

 We know, ever since Galileo in the 1600s, that two different masses, when dropped from the same height at the same time, and if air resistance is not a factor, the two objects land at the same time. Gravity's acceleration on objects is independent of mass. While this works well for everyday objects we can see, a big question has been does this hold true for small objects, like molecules or even atoms??? We now have the means of doing these experiments, and it turns out that yes, this is still true for atoms!! 

Check out this article from Science News about a really cool experiment! 

AND, we think we are pretty good pulling out our cell phones, and measuring time on the stop watch down to hundredths of a second. That's pretty good for everyday events we might want to time. But how small a time can humans actually measure? There are atomic clocks that are good down to nanoseconds (billionths) or even picoseconds (trillionths). A new experiment was done using x-ray photons and hydrogen molecules, though, where the wave nature of the electrons of the two hydrogen atoms were taken advantage of. 

X-ray photon were shot at H2 molecules. The photon could excite the closer electron, and then travel the tiny distance to the second hydrogen atom and excite that electron. A special type of electron microscope imaged the interference pattern caused by the two electron waves, and measured where that pattern was centered with respect to the molecule. The slight distance this point was from the midpoint of the molecule is caused by the time taken for the photon to travel the bond length of the molecule. This time was 247 zeptoseconds! A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second, or 10^-21 seconds!  WOW!!!!!! This is the time it takes a photon to travel the length of a hydrogen molecule! 

Read about it here!