Making the invisible visible

a British polymath, published “Micrographia”, a book in which he described using what was then still a relatively new instrument—the microscope—to investigate the tiniest structures of everything from rocks to insects. Zooming in on a slice of cork, he saw a honeycomb-like structure and coined the term “cell” to describe the tiny pores he saw. Microscopes have come a long way since the 17th century and have helped scientists see smaller things in ever more detail. But they still have their limits—modern optical microscopes cannot image structures smaller in size than the wavelength of visible light, or a few hundred nanometres. Because light spreads out as it moves through small gaps, detail below a certain scale gets fuzzy.