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01 / 05
Microscopic to Astronomic Knowledge Discovery

Blog Post | Scientific Research

Microscopic to Astronomic Knowledge Discovery

Compared to the unaided eye, humans see 100 million times more with microscopes and 375.5 billion times more with telescopes.

Gale L. Pooley —

Summary: Human vision has always been limited, but through centuries of innovation—from early lenses to today’s most advanced microscopes and telescopes—we’ve extended our sight to both the atomic level and to distant galaxies. Instruments like cryo-electron microscopes and space telescopes have amplified our ability to explore the microscopic and cosmic, transformed our capacity for discovery.

Limitations in our sense of vision have driven us to invent and share new instruments of knowledge discovery. The unaided human eye can see a 100 micrometer (μm) object, about half the diameter of a human hair. Naked-eye stargazers can see a sufficiently bright celestial object up to 2.5 million light-years away. This was the extent of our vision until around 1600, when glassmakers in the Netherlands started to experiment with shaping lenses. The results of their experiments have given us the astonishing power to see millions and even billions of times more.

Microscopes

Zacharias Janssen developed the first microscope in 1595. It could magnify objects 3 to 10 times their size. By the 1800s, magnification had improved to 1,000 times. A significant advancement occurred in 1931 with the use of the transmission electron microscope (TEM), which could magnify up to 1 million times. TEMs range in cost from $100,000 to $10 million or more, depending on their features. The most advanced TEM, located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, costs $27 million. This microscope can achieve a resolution of half the width of a hydrogen atom, making it the most powerful microscope in existence.

The scanning electron microscope (SEM), developed in 1937, had lower magnification (approximately 100,000 times) but could produce three-dimensional images. From the 1980s to the present, cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has increased magnification up to 5 million times; scanning probe microscopes—using methods such as atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning tunneling microscopy (STM)—have increased magnification up to about 100 million times.

However, magnification is only marginally meaningful unless paired with resolution, since empty magnification yields no useful details. For true improvement, resolution is critical.

The light microscopes of the 1800s could see 500 times more, at 0.2 μm. In the 1930s, electron microscopes improved resolution to 0.05 nanometers (nm), an increase to 2 million times magnification. Today’s cryo-EM/atomic microscopes have a resolution of 0.001 nm, which is 100 million times that of the unaided human eye.

Telescopes

Hans Lippershey is credited as the inventor of the first telescope, created in 1608. His instrument could magnify 3 times. After learning of the innovation the following year, Galileo built his own version and increased magnification to 30 times, yielding a 10 times improvement in one year. Telescopes have continued to improve in light-gathering power and resolution. In the 1700s and 1800s, innovations by Isaac Newton and others improved both of these factors. The Herschel reflecting telescope, produced in 1789, had 20 times better resolution and over 1,000 times better light-gathering power than the Galileo design. The Great Dorpat Refractor, built by Joseph Fraunhofer and completed in 1824, was the first modern, achromatic, refracting telescope. While the Herschel had a larger aperture, the Dorpat had much higher-quality lenses, yielding sharper and more measurable images.

The Hooker telescope was built in 1917 and offered 3 times resolution and 105 times improvement in light-gathering power over the Dorpat. The next major advancement was the creation of the Hubble telescope in 1990. As a space-based telescope 340 miles above the Earth’s atmosphere, it was 10 times sharper and more stable than its Earth-based counterparts. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched in 2021, has a much larger mirror (6.5 meter vs. 2.4 meter), giving it vastly greater light-gathering power, and it is optimized for the infrared spectrum.

The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is scheduled to go online in 2030. Compared to the JWST, the ELT is 6 times larger, giving it dramatically higher light-gathering power for ground-based observations. The ELT will achieve 14 times sharper resolution (0.005 arcsec vs. JWST’s 0.07 arcsec), especially when using adaptive optics. The JWST retains the edge in overall precision due to its space-based stability and optimized infrared systems, but the ELT will surpass it in spectroscopy, exoplanet imaging, and capturing the detailed structures of distant galaxies.

From the unaided human eye to the ELT, angular resolution will be 12,000 times better and light-gathering power will be 31 million times better. This gives the ELT a combined observational capability approximately 372.5 billion times greater than the unaided human eye. This staggering difference reflects advances in both resolution and light-gathering power, enabling us to study the universe in ways that were unimaginable just a few centuries ago.

Microscopes and telescopes are instruments of knowledge discovery. There has never been a better time to be alive if you want to zoom in and look at an individual 0.05 nm atom or zoom out and look at the edge of the universe, some 46.5 billion light-years away from Earth.

Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.

Scientific Research

AI Could Transform Mathematics

“According to a webpage started by the mathematician Terence Tao, AI tools have helped transfer about 100 Erdős problems into the “solved” column since October. The bulk of this assistance has been a kind of souped-up literature search, as it was with Sawhney’s initial success. But in many cases, LLMs have pieced together extant theorems—often in dialogue with their mathematician prompters—to form new or improved solutions to these niche problems. In at least two cases, an LLM was even able to construct an original and valid proof to one that had never been solved, with little input from a human.”

From Scientific American.

Ars Technica | Scientific Research

These 60,000-Year-Old Poison Arrows Are Oldest Yet Found

“Archaeologists have now found traces of a plant-based poison on several 60,000-year-old quartz Stone Age arrowheads found in South Africa, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. That would make this the oldest direct evidence of using poisons on projectiles—a cognitively complex hunting strategy—and pushes the timeline for using poison arrows back into the Pleistocene.”

From Ars Technica.

New York Times | Scientific Research

430,000-Year-Old Wooden Tools Are the Oldest Ever Found

“Early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there, two new studies indicate, pushing back the established time for such activity. The evidence includes a 500,000-year-old hammer made of elephant or mammoth bone, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece — the earliest wooden tools on record.

The findings suggest that early humans possessed sophisticated technological skills, the researchers said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany and a lead author of the wooden-tool paper, which was published on Monday in the journal PNAS, said the discoveries provided insight into the prehistoric origins of human intelligence.

Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at London’s Natural History Museum and an author on the elephant-bone study, which was published last week in Science Advances, concurred.

The artifacts in both studies, recovered from coal-mine sites, were probably produced by early Neanderthals or a preceding species, Homo heidelbergensis. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of them in Europe is a 210,000-year-old fossil unearthed in Greece. By the time Homo sapiens established themselves in Britain 40,000 years ago, other hominins had already lived there for nearly a million years.”

From New York Times.

IEEE Spectrum | Space

The Quest to Build a Telescope to Hear the Cosmic Dark Ages

“The instrument is called LuSEE-Night, short for Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment–Night. It will be launched from Florida aboard a SpaceX rocket and carried to the moon’s far side atop a squat four-legged robotic spacecraft called Blue Ghost Mission 2, built and operated by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas…

A moon-based radio telescope could help unravel some of the greatest mysteries in space science. Dark matter, dark energy, neutron stars, and gravitational waves could all come into better focus if observed from the moon. One of Burns’s collaborators on LuSEE-Night, astronomer Gregg Hallinan of Caltech, would like such a telescope to further his research on electromagnetic activity around exoplanets, a possible measure of whether these distant worlds are habitable. Burns himself is especially interested in the cosmic dark ages, an epoch that began more than 13 billion years ago, just 380,000 years after the big bang. The young universe had cooled enough for neutral hydrogen atoms to form, which trapped the light of stars and galaxies. The dark ages lasted between 200 million and 400 million years.”

From IEEE Spectrum.