Microscope optics

02/23/17

“How exactly do microscopes work?”
Microscopes are one of the most important inventions that humanity has ever created. With these devices, we can view the microscopic world in unparalleled detail, enabling accurate observations for a myriad of scientific fields. However, have you ever wondered how they worked in the first place? Well, let’s use our engineering mindset to think about it. Before we begin to work on this problem, let’s see if a similar problem has been solved before. If you research hard enough, then you will probably realize that our fundamental problem, taking a small image and magnifying it to a larger one, has been solved by refracting telescopes already. Believe it or not, optical microscopes use the exact same setup as these telescopes! This shows how discoveries in one field of science can be applied to a completely different one as well, and through intercommunication can both field benefit.