A World Unseen

Many things are too small to see with the human eye, yet are all around us. Things at the nanoscale where only thought in theory before the first microscopes were invented. In 1609, Galileo Galilei made the first compound microscope with a convex and concave lens to look at things much smaller than the human eye can perceive. Nowadays we use much more powerful microscopes such as the SEM or, Scanning electron microscope, to witness regular day things blown up thousands of times.

At UCLA, I observed amazing scanning electron microscopes and got to play with 3 different ones! Scanning electron microscopes beam down electrons to get a very clear, black and white, 3-D, blown up images of a small objects. It was really cool because we got to play with the magnification and look at things much larger to uncover new realities. On the new microscope we got to put our hair samples in the machine and look at them at greater magnification. When they were blown up larger, new patterns and details magically showed up that you could have never see before without a microscope of that magnitude.\

In 1665, Robert Hooke discovered cells in a piece of cork using a compound microscope. Compound microscopes are good because you can look at organisms without having to kill them to view them. You can watch them as they are moving in a fairly good magnification. We looked at different cells with fluorescent dyes under different lights and saw the things that we needed to see highlighted. We could see cells and DNA in different pigments so we knew which was which.

Microscopes are very important to science in objects that are very small. When you can see an object at much greater magnification, you can see the things that much more important they lay beyond the what your eye regularly perceives. At UCLA, we saw quite a bit of both microscopes and they were quite captivating to look through.