Waves. They rise and fall, like your chest when you inhale and exhale air.
Up and down, in a shape like this one. Waves are a disturbance that moves through
space and time, bringing energy from one place to another. You can see this pattern in many places:
the movement of water, the way that sound travels through air. These are called mechanical waves.
Light moves in waves, too. The light we see is a type of electromagnetic radiation,
sending energy from a source—like the sun—to every surface it can touch.
When the waves are shorter, they form more energetic radiation, like ultraviolet light,
x-rays, or gamma rays. Less energetic radiation has longer waves, like radio waves, which can
stretch more than 60 miles long from peak to peak! When you look at an image like this one,
based on the nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock print The Great Wave,
waves of visible light are bouncing off the image and eventually landing in your eye. But
what if you need to take a closer look? You could take this picture and put it under a microscope.
An optical microscope uses visible light, meaning you can only magnify the image 1000x at most.
But what if you need to look even closer? A light microscope just won't cut it. What you need is...
...An electron microscope, which can magnify images more than one hundred times larger than an
optical microscope. That's more than one hundred thousand times magnification.
It can make this... Look like this.
But how does it work? Electron microscopes are special microscopes
that take advantage of the interaction between an accelerated beam of electrons–part of an atom,
the smallest unit of a material–and the objects to obtain highly resolved images,
as well as other information about the object. We can image tiny little particles in a sample of
paintings, or we can image the texture of a bronze alloy or even map the chemistry of these objects.
All thanks to electrons. By looking closely,
we can unlock all sorts of mysteries.
So what is it like looking at art through an electron microscope?
Let's see how close we get with the naked eye. Okay, now let's grab our magnifying glass.
You can start to see how it was made. This is what the embroidery looks like under the microscope.
Pretty cool, but what's going on here? Let's take a closer look with our electron microscope.
This thread is wrapped in a thin metal strip! We never would have known how these threads were
prepared without our electron microscope. And by studying the chemical composition of the metal,
we can help preserve the lustrous shine of the embroidery for generations to come.
The world is a big place. It can be easy–and fun–to get lost in the little things.