Natural Science Forum / Physics / Optics / October 2006

I'm not an expert on microscopes, but I can make suggestions on how to
ask questions.

Tell us which class this assignment is for. I can imagine this being
from a science class, a history class, an English class (or do you call
it language arts now) or even a computer class. Each would be looking
for something slightly different.

"WHERE" and "HOW" have you searched already?

I suggest using http://www.google.com/

Ryan:

Smart of you to come to this group. There are some very adept
folk here who will
no doubt be happy to give you general pointers and "teach you how
to fish" for the information with search strings
and site references. But as Richard aptly pointed out above, it
will help us to know
more about the nature of your assignment. Can you also tell us
what search strings
you have been using? If you do not know Boolean search operators,
you seem smart enough to master them in less than half an hour.
Run these searches on www.vivisimo.com +"boolean language
tutorial" --and then if you don't find enough, try
+"boolean language" +tutorial. You will find using Boolean syntax
in your searches will help quite a bit. Google aside, you will
like the clustering nature of vivisimo.com, which will organize
your results in categories it establishes. This clustering
feature is especially
helpful when you are looking for results in an area unfamiliar to
you and you get plenty returned by a search.

Regards,

Edward Hennessey

In some respects, they have not changed much from 2000 to 2006.  But
that depends on which type of microscopes you are talking about.

There are light microscopes, which went through confocal and AFM
developments and then SEM which has seen basically incremental change
over the past five to six years.  I think TEM is pretty much the same
other than moving from film capture to digital capture.

So, it depends.

Gary Gaugler, Ph.D.
Microtechnics, Inc.
Granite Bay, CA 95746
916.791.8191
gary@microtechnics dot com

In some respects, they have not changed much from 2000 to 2006.  But
that depends on which type of microscopes you are talking about.

There are light microscopes, which went through confocal and AFM
developments and then SEM which has seen basically incremental change
over the past five to six years.  I think TEM is pretty much the same
other than moving from film capture to digital capture.

So, it depends.

Gary Gaugler, Ph.D.
Microtechnics, Inc.
Granite Bay, CA 95746
916.791.8191
gary@microtechnics dot com

A few points, all microscopes are changing from mechanically driven to
electric motor drive.  Look on the Olympus site and compare the IX-51 and
IX-71, look at what the motor drive 71 is capable of.  Next on to physics,
confocal is just about required if your doing serious research.  Check out
the web sites of the 4 big makers, Nikon, Olympus, Carl Zeiss and Leica.
Last but not least every thing is changing, check out meta-optics the real,
live wave of the future capable of making simple, perfect lenses.  The first
page in the Zeiss web sight has an astonishing picture, it uses meta-optics
other wise known as left handed optics, its under the heading of Zeiss
giving an award to two physicists.

As to how this has helped, these instruments can now see and assist in
reconstructing large in square area and in depth (Z axis).  Thats what makes
confocal and multi-photon so interesting.  Look at all the makers sites.

Kevin Cunningham
SMS