What would happen if we could zoom in with a microscope infinitely? Would we keep seeing more detail or is there a ‘cut off’ where we can’t see any more detail?
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Surprised no one has mentionend the Abbe diffraction limit, which states that the resolution of a microscope is inversly proportional to the wavelength of light.
This is because, 1) when light waves encounter the edge of an obstacle or, in the case of a microscope, its apeture, it gets “bent”, going off in different directions which makes the resulting picture blurry and 2) the amount of diffraction (not to be confused with scattering where the relationship between the wavelength and sacttering is the opposite to diffraction) is proportional to its wavelength, meaning light with shorter wavelength gets diffracted less, resulting in a higher resolution.
Ans an aside, conceptually, this is the reason why electron microscopy is so much more precise than light microscopy, because the de Broglie wavelength of electrons is much shorter than that of photons since their mass, and therefore their momentum, is much greater.
To try and conclude this answer, depending on the type of microscope you’re using, the details you’re able to make out are limited by the diffraction of the photon, or whatever kind of particle you’re using to see; at some point of zooming in, different point sources of light will blur together because of the phenomenon of diffraction. These diffraction patterns are called Airy disks btw (nothing to do with air, but named after George Biddell Airy), [this](https://www.microscopyu.com/microscopy-basics/resolution) site has a nice visualization.
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