Heinrich Rohrer, who shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing a microscope that made it possible to see individual atoms and move them around, an achievement that led to vastly faster computing and greatly advanced molecular biology, died on Thursday night or early Friday morning in Wollerau, Switzerland. He was 79.

His family said he had died of natural causes.

Dr. Rohrer and his colleague Gerd Binnig introduced the device, the scanning tunneling microscope, or STM, at an I.B.M. laboratory in Zurich in 1981, after decades of explosive growth in microscopy. The STM enabled scientists to make accurate images of details as tiny as one-25th the diameter of a typical atom.

The advance helped give rise to the science of nanotechnology: the manipulation of matter at the atomic or molecular scale. Nanotechnology has revealed the structure of things like viruses and computer chips and improved industrial processes like metal fabrication and the manufacture of computer components, clothing, cosmetics and paint.

Dr. Rohrer and Dr. Binnig shared the Nobel Prize with Ernst Ruska, who invented the electron microscope in 1931.