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?

Question

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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Answer 1

You can only see details about as big as the thing you’re using to see them with…for a conventional microscope using visible light, you can get down to about 400 nanometers. That’s enough to see most microscopic structures but too big to see individual molecules, let alone atoms.

To get down to molecular levels you need somethign with a much smaller wavelength…electron microscopes can get down to the individual atom level, albeit pretty fuzzy. Below that we don’t know how to make anything that directly visualizes things, we need to use particle acceleators and detectors to look at the bits coming out of collisions to figure out what’s in there but we can’t “see” details in any sense.