The impact of physics on society and the mission of physics education in secondary schools

from defect or intrinsic surface steps can be used to structure the surface itselfwith the possibility to include also layers deeper than the topmost one. The use ofartificially created adatom-hole pairs as binary units with writing, reading and rewriting possibilities certainly would give rise to the utmost possible storage density. Artificial structures on the surface can be built either with native substrate atoms or adsorbed species and their properties can be investigated with spectroscopic methods. Important progress for nanoelectronics can be expected from the ability to modify with the tip internal molecule conformations. The successful induction of all steps of a complex chemical reaction using force, current and field effects raises the hope that new molecules can be built by taking different parent molecules apart and welding dissociation products together at will to synthesize new molecules, whose properties can be investigated again bytunneling spectroscopy.As controlled atomic manipulation allows the design of arbitrary scattering geometries, on the basis ofa deeper understanding of the electron lifetimes it should become possible to even engineer these lifetimes, which are a key quantity in quantum computing and quantum transportation. A further important present goal is to transfer all possibilities outlined here to technologically important substrates like insulators; for sufficiently thin insulator films on metallic substrates the .use of the STM is still possible.