Microscopic vision
Dear HIW, Your magazines are amazing. What is the smallest thing a microscope can see? Yifan Bao There are two main types of microscope. The light microscope focuses visible light through its lenses to magnify an image. This allows people to see objects as small as 500 nanometres – 200 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Electron microscopes use beams of electrons instead. As electrons bounce off an object, a detector records the exact location of contact and turns these points into an outlined image. This enables scientists to see things with a length less than one nanometre. With this it’s possible to view individual atoms within an image.