Visualizing Molecules

As the human experience continues to expand into the macro scale with developments like the growth of the Internet, we also are creating images of phenomena on the micro scale, also.

This headline from the Daily Mail reads almost like a haiku:

Single molecule,
one million times smaller than a grain of sand,
pictured for first time

I have to question though what this means in the sense that we are trying to perceive force patterns and geometries more so than looking at solid "things" like bugs under a optical microscope.

This is the 'picture' of the pentacene molecule imaged by an atomic force microscope:

This is the molecule recreated in 3D:

Finally, this is what the atoms look like when you get REALLY, REALLY close: