(Nanowerk News) Part of being human means living with the understanding that, sometimes, seeing isn’t the only route to believing. For centuries, scientists have battled the nebulous challenges presented by the invisible through rigorous experiments of exponentially shrinking scale. It is exactly this cat-and-mouse game of conquest that has provided many of the fundaments upon which modern science rests. In order to discover cells, for example, both scientists Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek constructed their own microscopes to seek out these tiny universes. Similarly, in order to examine the worlds of bacteria and microbes, in 1931, German physicists Max Knoll and Ernst Ruska constructed the first prototype of the electron microscope.
Today, science is pushing the limits of what we can and cannot see, by not only using the electron microscope to its fullest potentials, but creating art beneath it. Using combinations of chemicals, refined lab techniques, and the finest in optical technologies, two Harvard scientists have begun creating intricate crystalline structures that look quite a bit like delicate, organic flower blossoms.
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