"Suppose you lived in a world in which the ground was a crossword puzzle. Would you or would you not try to solve the puzzle?""
"Roger, at Cornell University they have an incredible piece of scientific equipment known as the Tunneling Electron Microscope. Now, this microscope is so powerful that by firing electrons you can actually see images of the atom, the infinitesimally minute building blocks of our universe. Roger, if I were using that microscope right now, I still wouldn't be able to locate my interest in your problem. "
"A lot of the other companies, including GE, told me about their retirement plans and their beautiful new laboratories and not much about electron microscopy, but Zworykin showed me an old abandoned factory building. It was really a decrepit place. He asked me how soon can I build a microscope. "
"You have to be absolutely patient, but suddenly one atom was sitting right in front of the tip and I got atomic resolution. That’s the way to success, not giving up."
"We were bombarded — this is the best way to put it — by requests from all the medical people and all the colloidal physics people — everybody that had things too small to be seen in a light microscope. We quickly realized that two graduate students working in a makeshift lab with a makeshift instrument couldn't satisfy the needs for this tool. "
"It took me about twenty years before I had the right system that could be realized in practice and that scientist said it could work"
"Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate. Indeed, we often mark our progress in science by improvements in imaging. "
"There was no physical law to prevent it."