How Can You See an Atom? (video)
Bestselling author Sam Kean takes us through the nearly 2,400-year quest to see the atom in a new episode of the Reactions sub-series, “Legends of Chemistry”
Since ancient Greek times, philosophers and scientists have pondered the atom. For a couple thousand years, humans could only speculate on the structure and other properties of the smallest unit of matter. It wasn’t until the 1980s that chemists saw individual atoms.