Abstract:
Gerd Binnig still recalls what it felt like in 1981 when he tested his technical innovations and saw atomic structures for the first time. “It was like a dream to discover all this,” said Binnig, a fellow at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory who shared a Nobel Prize in physics for designing the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and helped create the atomic force microscope (ATM). “It was like being for the first time on the moon.”