At the Max Born Institute in Berlin, physicists have achieved something long sought in the study of matter: a way to watch electrons move without disturbing the very motion being observed. Using two ultraviolet pulses each lasting a fraction of a billionth of a billionth of a second, they captured the oscillation of an electron hole in xenon ions with a clarity that older methods, burdened by their own interference, could not provide. It is a quiet but consequential step — science learning, at last, to look without touching.