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Atomic force microscopy permits us to view individual atoms and chemical bonds.
If you're mystified by why I think this is so great, consider that chemists work every day with tools whose functional units we can't actually see. We know they must be there. We can infer a great deal about their properties and functions. But at times we also have heated debates about the shape of those tools, because we can't see them. Benzene was isolated in 1825, but it took another 40 years for someone to reason their way to the correct structure, and more than a century to confirm the theory by direct measurement (1929, with x-ray crystallography, which maps electron density among the atoms in a crystal).
And now... we can turn on a computer and look at pictures of molecules which are every bit as valid as ones taken by a digital camera. This, my friends, is Science!
If you're mystified by why I think this is so great, consider that chemists work every day with tools whose functional units we can't actually see. We know they must be there. We can infer a great deal about their properties and functions. But at times we also have heated debates about the shape of those tools, because we can't see them. Benzene was isolated in 1825, but it took another 40 years for someone to reason their way to the correct structure, and more than a century to confirm the theory by direct measurement (1929, with x-ray crystallography, which maps electron density among the atoms in a crystal).
And now... we can turn on a computer and look at pictures of molecules which are every bit as valid as ones taken by a digital camera. This, my friends, is Science!