But lets be clear, that is not “seeing” an atom.
No, light is much too gross to see that. However, being able to move individual atoms around should convince anyone that we actually do know quite a lot about them.
To be honest, I find this to be much more impressive.
Wacky ideas? I don’t know if I can agree with that.
Would one call Planck, De Broglie, Einstein, Bohr, Born, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Pauli, Feynman etc. etc. wacky guys, or should they be called geniuses of the first order?
Would their ideas really be considered wacky, or would they be considered the output of brilliant, one in a million, minds?
Why can’t they be both? 
Many of the ideas we’ve come to accept as validated theories in science started out as, if not on the lunatic fringe, were at least really outside the mainstream. The manner by which Richard Feynman came to formulate quantum electrodynamics was pretty informal until Freeman Dyson showed it to be equivalent to the operator approach of Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger. Paul Dirac made a large number of assertions during his career that later turned out to be wrong (or at least partially wrong) but still managed to do some fundamentally groundbreaking and brilliant work. Murray Gell-Mann’s work on quantum chromodynamics was really out there and he took a number of wrong turns before coming to his “Eightfold Way”. Steven Weinberg’s approach at a unified electroweak theory was pretty out there at first, and his “Technicolor” approach at a unified field theory, long dismissed, is now coming back into vogue.
The same is equally true in other fields; molecular biology, geophysics, astronomy and cosmology, evolutionary zoology, et cetera. Of course, most wacky ideas are actually completely flaketastical, even those that come from credible sources. I think John Archibald Wheeler–the sage mentor to a couple of generations of groundbreaking physicists–probably had a batting average of less than 0.100, and never mind guys like Frank Hoyle, Linus Pauling, Lynn Margulis, or (probably) Roger Penrose, who did great work in their fields (sometimes multiple fields) but also promulgated utterly unsubstantiated hypotheses in other areas. But sometimes it is the wackiest, most unexpected ideas that stick to the wall and take hole, revolutionizing our understanding of the natural world and our place in it.
Stranger
I don’t think you can non call Feynman wacky.
They certainly considered each other to be “wacky”. Einstein never did like quantum mechanics, as proposed by Niels Bohr and his band of “shake up the physics world” renegades Heisenberg and Pauli.
It’s not so much that Einstein didn’t like quantum mechanics per se as that he didn’t believe it to be a complete theory based upon the conclusions that were drawn about it; specifically, the apparent arbitrary and stochastic nature of interactions, and the seeming contradiction to causality that is the basis of relativity.
While his fundamental objections were more aesthetic than practical, there is a strong case to be made that quantum mechanics tells us nothing about the fundamental underpinnings of reality, and perhaps even less than nothing. And really, most quantum mechanics experts would agree. Neils Bohr once wrote, “There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.” All quantum mechanics really does is give us a framework on which to make predictions; the insight it offers into the actual workings of reality on the quantum level is negligible, at least in terms of being able to relate to our everyday experience.
Stranger