What is Microscopy?
Who does Microscopy? A lot more people than you imagine. People from all walks of life use a microscope for leisure and pleasure rather than for work. Although many professional people will use a microscope as a tool to aid their work, some of them – along with people who’s work has nothing to do with microscopy – will use a microscope at home as a serious or casual hobby to look more closely at things which interest them.
Microscopy is a scientific discipline which involves magnifying objects which cannot be seen with the naked eye. The goal of this branch of the sciences is to render these objects visible for study, allowing researchers to learn more about them and how they work. There are a number of different types of microscopy, and innumerable applications for it. Biology in particular relies heavily on microscopy to gather information, and this scientific tool is in daily use all over the world everywhere from high school science labs to the Centers for Disease Control. The roots of microscopy lie in the 1600s, when scientists and engineers first started to develop lenses which were capable of significant magnification, allowing people to see things which had been invisible before. An explosion in interest occurred when researchers started documenting the “animalcules,” otherwise known as microorganisms, in everything from drinking water to saliva. The realization that a miniature world existed wi
Microscopy is a field of investigation which is used to study objects which are too small to be easily viewed by the human eye. Viewing and studying objects that range in size from millimeters (1mm ~ 0.04″ = 4 hundredths of an inch) to nanometers (1 nm ~ 0.00000004″ = 40 billionths of an inch) intrigues everyone and is currently applied to every field of science and technology in use today. Microscopes, devices which magnify, come in a wide range of forms and use a multitude of illumination sources ( light, electrons, ions, x-rays and and mechanical probes) and signals to produce an image. A microscope can be as simple as a hand held magnifying glass or as complex as a multi-million dollar research instrument. Using these tools, a microscopist explores the relationship of structure and properties of a wide variety materials in order to more fully understand the reasons why a particular item behaves the way it does. It is a fascinating discipline which is applied to all fields from biol
