Toward a New Dimension Exploring the Nanoscale

Imagine Galileo pointing his telescope not toward the sky but instead toward molecules, and discovering there a hitherto unimagined world. This is the adventure of nanoscale scientists exploring single molecules and moreover controlling them at will. This book presents key historical moments in the birth and evolution of nanoscience in the last thirty years. It narrates the genesis of revolutionary instruments and new species of molecule size objects. Nanoscalescientific research has not only powerfully affected the amount and orientation of knowledge, it has perhaps even more significantly redirected the ways in which much research work is carried out,changed scientists' methodology and reasoning processes, and influenced aspects of the structure of career trajectory and the functioning of scientific disciplines. This book invites the question: to what extent does nanoscale scientific research constitute a kind of 'scientific revolution'?