Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Tom Subirge's avatar

Karl ! - wanted to congratulate your new Leica setup. Visibly, the photos are MUCH better than your original setup. Another thing, I wanted to commend you on reporting "reasonable" magnifications. Briefly, a couple months ago we saw everybody jump on the bandwagon of extremely high "magnification." We saw claims of 2000x, 5000x even 10,000x - which in truth only made me smile. Such claims have fallen into the trap of "empty magnification." Sure... one can "magnify" an image to the size of a highway billboard, say a "million x", but the RESOLUTION stays at 300x or 800x. The best objective lenses Leica sells are "only" in the range of 120x, provided oil immersion is used. Phase contrast might be able to boost resolution a bit, but not that much, maybe an added 100x considering TOTAL magnification. The objective is where the resolution comes from. The eyepieces, or oculars, most commonly are 10x, rarely you will find 20x in use. Why so low? Because the eyepiece does not provide increased resolution; it only provides magnification of the image provided by the objective. This means resolution is the SAME with a 10x eyepiece, or a 20x eyepiece. Another limitation is higher eyepiece magnification provides a narrower field of view, so you really cant scan over a large sample area nearly as fast as with a 10x. Here is a useful link that explains all this, which also defines the limit of optical microscopes: https://www.leica-microsystems.com/science-lab/microscopy-basics/beware-of-empty-magnification/ Best wishes!

Expand full comment
Stegiel's avatar

Observationally, at Tuft's University, Michael Levin is doing a tremendous amount of work with his lab of 32 people on synthetic life. He is pretty wide open to communication though first I'd suggest reviewing some of his Youtube channel. I would be very interested, and I am sure you would be as well, in any observations. And I think he would as well. If he is unaware of this phenomena that too would be interesting. https://youtu.be/4d2SC3MFTBI?t=64

Expand full comment
12 more comments...

No posts