- What exactly did Laveran see under the microscope that led him to identify the cause of malaria?
Electron Microscopy
Imaging at atomic and molecular resolution using electron beams.
- What modern technologies rely on the wave nature of matter that de Broglie proposed?
- What modern technologies depend on the wave nature of matter that de Broglie proposed?
- Why can't optical microscopes resolve detail finer than about half the wavelength of visible light?
- How did Ruska and Knoll use magnetic fields to focus electrons the way glass lenses focus light?
- Why was a magnification of only seventeen times still considered a breakthrough in 1931?
- What kinds of structures became visible for the first time once electron microscopes surpassed optical instruments?
- What modern technologies rely on the wave nature of electrons confirmed in 1937?
- Why was Gabor working on electron microscopy when he arrived at the idea of holography?
- Why couldn't the microscope answer what proteins were present in blood serum?
- Why were transparent cells nearly invisible under a conventional light microscope before phase contrast?
- How does phase-contrast microscopy convert an invisible phase shift in light into visible contrast?
- Why did staining or fixing a specimen make it impossible to observe certain living processes?
- Why did it take Zeiss engineers nearly a decade to build Zernike's design into a working instrument?
- What technologies that Feynman's lecture anticipated, like atomic-force microscopes and molecular machines, didn't exist yet in 1959?
- What problem with electron microscope images led Dennis Gabor to invent holography?
- How did Albert Claude use a centrifuge to separate different structures inside a broken-open cell?
- Why did X-ray crystallography fail for molecules that would not form crystals, and why did electron microscopy flatten the structures it imaged?
- Why can electrons resolve finer structure than visible light in a microscope?
- How does quantum tunnelling let a scanning tunnelling microscope map individual atoms?
- Why did Ernst Ruska wait fifty-three years between his invention and his Nobel Prize?
- How did the scanning tunnelling microscope open the door to nanotechnology?
- Why did GFP tagging let biologists watch cellular processes happen live, rather than only in fixed, dead tissue?
- What is Abbe's diffraction limit and why did it seem to cap microscope resolution at around 200 nanometres?
- How does STED microscopy use a second laser to sharpen resolution below the diffraction limit?
- How can switching individual fluorescent molecules on and off one at a time reconstruct a nanometre-scale image?
- What kinds of cellular structures became visible for the first time once super-resolution microscopy existed?