Re:Not color, false color. (Score 1)

The analogy in the article is technically correct. The atoms are actually "seen" in "color" by the microscope. Photons of light have an energy associated with them. For instance, blue light has a higher energy than red light. Sometimes when an electron scatters off of an atom in the sample, these electrons will lose a specific amount of energy which is related to the type of atom that they scattered from. If an electron looses allot of energy then it can be represented as blue while an electron which loses very little energy can be represented as red. This is similar to how we call photons of light at 450nm as blue and photons of light with 625 nm as red. So imagine that you see the world only in black and white. The brightness of an object is based entirely on the amount of light that is reflected, transmitted, or emitted by that object. This is how conventional electron microscopes normally create their images. However if you start discriminating the photons of light according to their energy now you can start assigning real colors to the objects in the world around you. This new microscope built by Nion can discriminate (at very high resolution) the energies of electrons that pass through a sample. In this way they can assign "colors" to the atoms in the sample.