zlacker

Annual reminder to re-read "There's plenty of room at the bottom" by Feynman. https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf

Note the part where the biologists tell him to make an electron microscope that's 1000X more powerful. Then note what technology was used to scan these images.

>>dekhn+(OP)
I think it's actually "What you should do in order for us to make more rapid progress is to make the electron microscope 100 times better" and the state of art at the time was "it can only resolve about 10 angstroms" or I guess 1nm. So 100x better would be 0.1 angstrom / 0.01 nm.

We have made some progress it seems. Googling I see "up to 0.05 nm" for transmission electron microscopes and "less than 0.1 nanometers" for scanning. https://www.kentfaith.co.uk/blog/article_which-electron-micr...

For comparison the distance between hydrogen nuclei in H2 is 0.074 nm I think.

You can see the shape of molecules but it's still a bit fuzzy to see individual atoms https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/chemistry/molecular-model...

>>tim333+sr1
Resolution is only one aspect of EM that can be optimized.

>>dekhn+Hw1
It would be cool if they had a way of identifying which atoms are which.