Louis Victor de Broglie, a theoretical physicist and member of the French nobility, is best known as the father of wave mechanics, a far-reaching achievement that significantly changed modern physics. Wave mechanics describes the behavior of matter, including subatomic particles such as electrons, with respect to their wave characteristics. For this groundbreaking work, de Broglie was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize for physics. De Broglie's work contributed to the fledgling science of microbiology in the mid-1920s, when he suggested that electrons, as well as other particles, should exhibit wave-like properties similar to light. Experiments on electron beams a few years later confirmed de Broglie's hypothesis. Of importance to microscope design was the fact that the wavelength of electrons is typically much smaller than the wavelength of light. Therefore, the limitation imposed on the light microscope of 0.4 micrometers could be significantly reduced by using a beam of electrons to...