Tribute to the mirco/telescopic imaging techniques
On the occasion of the first image of black hole published yesterday, I write this tribute to memorize the achievements of modern technology in imaging the very far as well as the very small objects. Imaging the very small – the atoms A FIM image of PtAu alloy, each white dot is an atom. On Oct. 11st 1955 , prof. Erwin W. Müller and his Ph.D. student Kanwar Bahadur captured the first image of individual atoms . That was an image of a sharply pointed tip of tungsten captured with the field ion microscope (FIM) invented by Müller in 1951. Read more about this milestone in this article: Atomic Imaging Turns 50 Later, many types of electron microscope had been advanced to the atomic resolution. Then in the early 1980s , scanning tunneling microscope (STM, 1981) and atomic force microscope (AFM, 1982) were invented in IBM labs to image as well as to manipulate individual atoms . On April 30th 2013, IBM Research released the stop-motion animation " A Boy and His Atom &qu