Abstract
In this paper, the evolutionary and revolutionary developments of microscopic imaging are overviewed with a perspective on origins. From Alhazen’s camera obscura, to Hooke and van Leeuwenhoek’s two-dimensional optical micrography, and on to three- and four-dimensional (4D) electron microscopy, these developments over a millennium have transformed humans’ scope of visualization. The changes in the length and time scales involved are unimaginable, beginning with the visible shadows of candles at the centimetre and second scales, and ending with invisible atoms with space and time dimensions of sub-nanometre and femtosecond. With these advances it has become possible to determine the structures of matter and to observe their elementary dynamics as they unfold in real time. Such observations provide the means for visualizing materials behaviour and biological function, with the aim of understanding emergent phenomena in complex systems.
Highlights
In this paper, the evolutionary and revolutionary developments of microscopic imaging are overviewed with a perspective on origins
The philosophers of the past must have been baffled by the question: what is light and what gives rise to the associated optical phenomena? A leading contribution to this endeavour was made by the Arab polymath Alhazen (Ibn alHaytham; AD 965–1040)
Alhazen’s idea that light must travel along straight lines and that the object is inverted in the image plane is no different from the modern picture of ray diagrams taught in optics today
Summary
The ever-increasing progress made by humans in making the very small and the very large visible and tangible is truly remarkable. Alhazen’s idea that light must travel along straight lines and that the object is inverted in the image plane is no different from the modern picture of ray diagrams taught in optics today (figure 2). His brilliant work was published in the Book of Optics or, in Arabic, Kitab al-Manazir. More than a hundred years later, an experiment by the physicist, physician and Egyptologist, Thomas Young, demonstrated the interference of light, an experiment that revolutionized our views on the nature of light His double-slit experiment of 1801 performed at the Royal Institution of Great Britain led to the demise of Newton’s corpuscular theory of light. Optical techniques have led to considerable improvement in spatial resolution, as discussed below
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