Path of Microscopy - History and Present

When on the eve of the XVII century was created the first microscope, hardly anyone (and even its inventor) could imagine future success and numerous areas of microscopy. In retrospect, we see that this invention marked a little more than a new device: the first time people got a chance to see previously invisible.

Around this same time there was another event the invention of the telescope that allows you to see the invisible world of planets and stars. The invention of the microscope and the telescope was a revolution not only in the ways of studying nature, but in the method of research.

Indeed, the natural philosophers of antiquity observed the nature, finding out about it only what the eye could see, skin could feel, and ear could heard. One can only wonder how much accurate information about the world they inquired using "naked" sensory organs and not putting in specific experiments, as it is done now. However, along with accurate facts and brilliant guesses as many false "observation", the allegations and the findings have left us, scientists of antiquity and the Middle Ages!

Only much later was found by studying nature, placing consciously planned experiments, whose purpose is to test assumptions and explicit hypotheses. Features of this research method, Francis Bacon - one of its creators - expressed in the following, which became famous words: "Doing an experiment – it is to question nature." The very first steps of the experimental method of modern concepts have been modest, and in most cases, the experimenters of the time treated without any device, "amplifying" the senses. The invention of the microscope and the telescope was a tremendous expansion of opportunities of observation and experiment.

Even the first observations made with the simplest and most imperfect of modern concepts, techniques, opened the whole world in a drop of water ". It turned out that the familiar things look quite different when viewed under a microscope: plain to see and touch surfaces are really rough, "pure" water moving myriads of tiny organisms. Similarly, the first astronomical observations using telescopes have enabled people to see anew the familiar world of planets and stars: for example, the Moon, sung by poets of all generations, was mountainous and dotted with many craters, while Venus was discovered phase change, like Moon.

Later these simple observations will provide distinct areas of life science microscopy, and observational astronomy. Years later, each of these areas will develop into numerous branches, are expressed in a number of various applications in biology, medicine, engineering, chemistry, physics, navigation.

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