The irony is that the confocal microscope is the workhorse of biology. A scanning confocal often costs a few hundred thousand minimum and is a pain to maintain so individual labs don’t have one, but every lab and near every project will need you to do some microscopy work, most often confocal. Yet, it’s not what won the Nobel prize, the practically useless superresolution work is what won it. The brilliance of confocal is that it lets you worry less about sample prep than a regular microscope, while with superresolution microscopes you have to worry about it infinetely more.
Confocal and multiphoton microscopy were the staple of my Masters and PhD research. I was hooked from the first time I got to operate one, the sheer beauty of what you can capture in true 3D volumes is on another level from conventional photography and brightfield microscopy. Multiphoton lets you live image cells and tissues and directly visualise the dynamics of how they move about and change over time, which gives you even more insight into the function of biological systems. Absolutely incredible technologies.
People tend to be surprised that Minsky invented the confocal microscope before he joined the MIT faculty (and after the famous 1956 Dartmouth summer workshop on AI)
Used to work in the Oxford lab that developed some of the earliest confocal microscopes. I had one of the early Oxford instruments mentioned under my table. Always wondered why it didn't find it's way to a museum. Science historical artifacts aren't a huge field of history yet I guess and items only a few decades old aren't that exciting to the average person. Technology becomes ancient faster than anything else.
I was offered a 3d laserscanning microscope that combines confocal microscopy with interferometry. Manufacturer claims resolution "up to 0,01nm", (10pm), not a typo. That is quite remarkable if true but I wonder what that even means...
My guess would be they're using green light, measuring phase with a 16-bit DAC, and implicitly fibbing about their signal-to-noise ratio. That's baked in to "up to".
I'm guessing provided you have a dilute enough solution, it will tell you where particles that small are, but you won't actually be able to "see" them.
They seem to target quality control in manufacturing (semiconductor, electronics etc...). What is puzzling to me is that even your typical atom is an order of magnitude larger than that claimed resolution.
Not sure why this article made it to front page, but fwiw, I used to work as a research engineer in a role where using a confocal microscope in clinical trial settings was a regular part of my job. AMA :D
Meta: I submitted it ~2 months ago because I ran into the topic for work reasons. I found the connection to Minsky reason enough since I didn't know that, and also the technology itself is of course very cool and probably not well known outside the relevant fields.
The post did not get a lot of attention, but a couple of days ago I got what I think is my first offer to re-post from the admins, and since I still found the topic interesting I thought it was worth giving it a second chance.
Meta meta: it seems people are more inclined to question submissions' topicality these days, which I find a bit stressful. Submitting Wikipedia articles about cool/interesting/novel/unknown things (not only technical in nature, for sure) feels to me like a cornerstone of this place (and I've been here a while now).
