At the end of the 1980s, in a stroke of genius, Darmstadt physicist Harald Rose succeeded in rendering atoms visible by fitting electron microscopes with “spectacles” which redirected the errant electron beams that blurred the image.
With his colleagues Maximilian Heider and Knut Urban, Rose put his concept into practice. In 2011 the three of them were awarded the Wolf Prize, an award that enjoys the same prestige amongst physicists as the Nobel Prize. Nowadays, researchers can purchase the bespectacled electron microscopes and view the now quite demystified atoms.
