An Introduction To Light Microscopy For Younger People and Beginners
by Mol Smith

Go to Page:   1      2      3      4      5      6      7      8      9      10      11      12      13      14      15      

  Understanding The Microscope
Page 9

If you are going to use something - a phone, a microscope, a fridge... it helps to uderstand how that thing works. Often, it can be very technical, and too much for younger people to grasp.  So here is a simple explanation. Light rays or waves are energy packets which travel the fastest anything can in the universe. When the light hits something, it begins to carry information about the thing it hit. Our eyes have evolved to receive and consider the information the light carries. We see an image. It is possible to manipulate light using shaped glass. A lens. We can stretch the light out so an image in the light gets bigger and bigger, like the beam of a torch. But it also gets fainter and dimmer.

An optical  light microscope is a device which manipulates light. It concertrates a light source first so the light is very bright and compacted into a tiny beam up through a glass slide. Specimens or samples of plants and microscopic creatures can be cut so thinly that light all but passes through them. These specimens are put into the light beam. The light passing through the specimen is then manipulated again by two lenses: the objective lens and the eyepiece lens. This results in a an image from a small part of the specimen being projected into our eye, greatly magnified. The highest magnification that can be achied with this method ia approximately 1600x. Further magnification does not produce any fine detail. The limit is imposed by something called the wavelength of light.

Light transmits information in a microscope