The X-Ray Laser

How do you take a photograph of something that finishes moving before the shutter could ever close?

A chemical bond breaks in a few femtoseconds - millionths of a billionth of a second. To catch that, you need X-rays short enough to freeze it and precise enough to resolve individual atoms, at a wavelength close to 1.5 angstroms. Building a light source that could do that took three separate fields of physics converging on one machine: a particle accelerator forced to …