On the evening of April 28, Nobel laureate Dr. Heinrich Rohrer attracted thousands of Zhejiang University students and faculty members with his speech “From Einstein to Nanotechnology”. Academician Zhang Ze presided over the dialogue session in which Dr. Rohrer interacted with students with his humble while wise and enlightening remarks.
Dr. Heinrich Rohrer was born in 1933 in Switzerland. He graduated from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and joined the staff of the research laboratory of IBM in Zurich, studying Kondo systems, magnetic phase diagrams, multicritical phenomena, nanomechanics, nuclear magnetic resonance and so on. In 1981, he and his colleague developed scanning tunneling microscope (STM) which enabled them to make observations of the surface of silicon at the atomic level and to distinguish individual atoms. On the basis of STM, scientists developed atomic force microscope, magnetic force microscope and other related equipment which makes it possible for them to explore the nano world. Due to the profound impact of STM as a pioneering facility, Dr. Rohrer and his colleague won the Nobel Prize in 1986.
In his speech, Dr. Rohrer commented on the influence of age on scientific research. He held that age is not a pure concept of time; to scientists, age is the time when the mind gets stimulated and knowledge accumulated. Knowledge acquisition is sometimes tricky. When one’s instructor says "No", it might still lead to an opportunity for him. Everything is possible before it’s proven to be impossible. There is no fixed approach to scientific exploration. Confronted with problems, one should just try all means to make new discoveries. He hoped that students should think like theorists and conduct research like engineers, and that students of physics and chemistry should learn more mathematics.
