Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come - even if it came in a - living room - or to someone - with a humble living.
Stefan Hell
According to the belief, molecules closer together than 200 nanometers could not be told apart with focused light. This is because, in a packed molecular crowd, the molecules shout out their fluorescence simultaneously, causing their signal, their voices, to be confused.
I got bored with the topic; I felt this was 19th century physics. I was wondering if there was still something profound that could be made with light microscopy. So I saw that the diffraction barrier was the only important problem that had been left over.
When morning comes, you would better find yourself saying: 'I have so many choices of what to do or what to leave - every morning, every day. I better judge for myself, and - go ahead and do it.'
Calling on each molecule one by one? No way. I just told all of them to be quiet - except for a selected few.
I love to be a scientist. I've always enjoyed being curious.
I imagined there would be a way to crack the diffraction barrier. But of course I didn't know exactly how it would work, but I had a gut feeling that there must be something, and so I tried to think about it, to be creative.
I've always enjoyed doing challenging things and also challenging common wisdom.
I think that's something a scientist can do because a scientist works at a border, at the edge of science, at the edge of knowledge, and so there's a lot of fun of reaching out and thinking about things that other people didn't think about. And so it has a kind of exploratory notion, kind of adventurous part in it.
Eventually I realised there must be a way by playing with the molecules; trying to turn the molecules on and off allows you to see adjacent things you couldn't see before.
It's childish, but it still gives me great pleasure to see high-res pictures everyone told me would be impossible.
There is still refinement needed - we are working on being able to do the same things at lower light levels and with a larger field of view.
