[Corribus]

I agree, it's an amazing feat to be able to visualize single molecules like that. There's an element of "seeing is believing" at work here. For years you learn all this abstract stuff about molecules, and you believe it because it does, in a very complicated way, explain the way the world works. But to see it there in front of you... it's really quite incredible. Dare I say beautiful?  I'd be scoffed at by poets of course, but then there's the quote in my signature that I can fall back on by way of retort.

[Enthalpy]

For me it was plain magic.

The first time I read a tunnel effect microscope showed a picture of atoms, I took it for newspaper hype. Up to then, atoms were a firmly established theory, but to grasp only in thought. And then, the atomic force microscope showing Homo and excited molecular orbitals.

As magic as the first time exoplanets were proven. All my books told "we will never observe them" and "eternal conjecture", and then: Doppler shift. Even direct observation later.