Heinrich Rohrer

Heinrich Rohrer

Heinrich Rohrer (born 6 June 1933 - 16 May 2013) is a Swiss physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1986 with Gerd Binnig for their design of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM).

Quotes

• The coming nanometer age can, therefore, also be called the age of interdisciplinarity.
  • Heinrich Rohrer explaining how progress in miniaturization implies developing techniques in self-assembling molecular structures, in his Nishina Memorial Lecture at the University of Tokyo, on 25 June 1993. Published in Nishina memorial lectures: creators of modern physics. Springer. 2008. p. 506. ISBN 4431770550. 

• To my knowledge significant progress has never been born of competition. … In science, being 'better' than others is of little practical value. Examples of how absurd the idea of scientific competition is are abundant.
  • Heinrich Rohrer, in Science - A Part of Our Future, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews Vol. 19, 193, 1994.

• I lost all respect for angstroms.
  • in Autobiography, from Nobel Lectures, Physics 1981-1990, Editor-in-Charge Tore Frängsmyr, Editor Gösta Ekspång, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1993

• We live of novelty in science. So when you do something new, you have to overcome certain beliefs that it cannot be done, that it's not interesting and so on.
  • Interview with Heinrich Rohrer at the Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, 9 April, 2008. The interviewer is Adam Smith, Editor-in-Chief of Nobelprize.org.

• We had the freedom to make mistakes. That's something very important. Unfortunately, this freedom for scientists gets more and more lost. … Otherwise, you do the common things. You don't dare to do something beyond what everybody else thinks.
  • Interview with Heinrich Rohrer at the Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, 9 April, 2008. The interviewer is Adam Smith, Editor-in-Chief of Nobelprize.org.

• Young people are not yet biased in their mind. They are not completely taken by their expert opinions. Expert opinions have a difficulty to go beyond of what they know. When you start in a new field, from the point of view of a scientist, you certainly are 20 years younger, because in the new field you're not yet biased and you look at certain things a little bit more relaxed and a little bit more open.
  • Interview with Heinrich Rohrer at the Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, 9 April, 2008. The interviewer is Adam Smith, Editor-in-Chief of Nobelprize.org.