What’s The Smallest You Can See?



How small can you see? And how does tech help us see as small as individual atoms?

The smallest YOU can see with your eyes is roughly ten thousand times smaller than a meter. Things much smaller than that don’t reflect enough light for our eyes to register. So, people invented the optical microscope, which let us see things down to ten millionths of a meter by shining light and using lenses magnify the image. But past that, objects get smaller than the wavelength of visible light. So we need something even smaller to take a picture, like firing beams of electrons and measuring how they get reflected or transmitted.

There’s SO MUCH of the world that we can’t see with our eyes but we can see with technology!

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#shorts #animation #small #microscope #tech #science

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48 Comments

  1. I use to be able to read the line that you sign on a check that is in fact not a "line" in the traditional sense, but a line of text that generally says " originaldocumentoriginaldocument……."

  2. I feel dumb, but: I thought we could see individual atoms with the most powerful light microscopes, but that it took electron microscopes to see the proton/neutron nucleus and electron shell. This seems to be saying it takes an electron microscope just to see an atom?

  3. I'm working in an engineering company where we build ultra high precision machines for the car industry and I've seen a gear wobbling by 2 micrometers! (we have measuring machines that can measure 8 digits behind 0!!! Even whispering detects the machine!!!)
    Are my eyes like a microscope??? 🤔

  4. I actually think I can see molecules because one time I was looking at my eyelashes in the sun because I wanted to see how my eyelashes looks because I was thinking about like random things, and then I kept seeing like a white background in it and these tiny little things that were circular in the filling around

  5. Question: Since atoms are smaller than the wavelength of light, does that mean they—and everything else at the quantum level—exist in perpetual darkness?

  6. भगवान श्री कृष्ण जी इससे भी छोटे मे समा जाएगें और पुरी सृष्टी भगवान श्रीकृष्ण मे समा जाएगी ।
    हरे कृष्ण

  7. Amazing 👏. Can you see a nuetrino? What is Plank length?
    Can you explain a lithograph machine that makes transistors at the Picometer size?
    What is quantum entanglement?

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