"It's fantastic! I can't conceive of it!" exclaimed Klaus von Klitzing last week. The inconceivable, however, has long been familiar territory to the Polish-born, 42-year-old director of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, in Stuttgart, West Germany: the mind-boggling field of quantum mechanics is his special ground. This year, taking note of Von Klitzing's quantized Hall effect, an application of quantum theory's abstruse axioms to the more mundane field of commercial electronics, the Nobel Committee named him physics laureate. Said the boyish-looking father of three: "I've always wanted to answer all the questions that nature posed for us."
Von...
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