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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you would see nothing because despite the microscope having a perfect resolution, the photon density would be to sparse to give a visible image
So gluons are sticky but other particles can bounce off them?
> Would we keep SEEING more detail
Am I the only one who feels most answers ignore this operative word?
I’m standing in a corner of a dark garage, i.e. I can’t see.
I do however have a ping pong cannon.
Fire enough balls (and collect those bouncing back at me) and I can learn to discern an empty garage from one with a car in it. Maybe even figure out the shape of the car.
This is a very ELI5 of what “seeing” means. The cannon is a light source and the ping pong balls are photons (which my eyes collect passively).
Can I use this method with smaller objects placed on the garage floor?
A suitcase – no problem. A coffee mug – sure. What about a grain of salt?
When something is so light and small compared to the ping pong ball, either the ball bounces back from the floor as if there’s nothing on it, or maybe the ball just knocked off the grain (so the next ball *really* bounces off an empty floor).
> is there a ‘cut off’ where we can’t see any more detail?
Yes, the size of the ping pong ball limits what I can “see” with it. That’s the wave length other answers refer to.
We can’t see things smaller than photons , even then if there are few we can’t have a correct image
and if we throw The photons on the thing we want to see if it’s too small the electromagnetic waves will disturb it and we won’t see something of meaning
also even if we overcome this there is the plank length which is a theoretical limit
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.
The theoretical cut off, plank length, is quite interesting. As other posters say to measure smaller and smaller things you need shorter wavelengths of light. And shorter wavelengths of light need more energy to produce.
Now, if you tried to make light with a wavelength of plank length each photon would have so much energy they would immediately turn in to miniature black holes and disappear.
This is all just theoretical of course.
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