The following KQED
production was
produced in high definition.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
What could be more
human than the desire
to decode the mysteries
of the world around us?
In this pursuit, we've
pointed our devices
not only to the heavens above,
but also to the smallest things
below.
If you want a sense of how
far we've come in our yearning
to see the invisible,
a good place to start
is the Golub Collection,
nearly 100 antique microscopes
from the 17th, 18th,
and 19th centuries
housed at the University
of California, Berkeley.
They're beautiful.
They're hand made.
They're really
individual microscopes.
They were covered in vellum or
they're covered in fish skin.
They were hand stamped
with gold leaf.
When microscopes
were first invented,
they looked at anything
and everything.
They looked at bugs.
They looked at plants.
They looked at one of the
favorite things was pond scum.
Early microscopes led
17th century scientists,
like Englishman Robert Hooke
to important discoveries,
like the cell.
But these
unsophisticated devices
couldn't save early
researchers from reaching
some hilarious conclusions.
One of the things that the
microscopists looked at
were sperm cells.
And they realized that
sperm cells had something
to do with reproduction.
And so they imagined little
curled up people inside
of them.
In the 300 years since, the
size of what scientists can see
has shrunk considerably
from tiny animals
to individual cells
to chromosomes.
And now as of October of 2008 at
the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, researchers
are actually
able to count individual
atoms, even the smallest ones.
Welcome to the world's
most powerful microscope.
It's a big beast in a big box.
This Department of Energy
electron microscope
cost $27 million.
It can view objects twice as
small as the last generation
of the world's most
powerful microscopes.
Everybody was worried that
somehow it would be dropped
or it wouldn't quite
fit in through the side
of the building.
So it took all day to
get this machine in here.
It was hoisted up into
its own room on a crane.
And its power cable is
as thick as a fire hose.
300,000 volts goes
up into the gun.
The electrons are accelerated
and that gets them up
to near the speed of light.
At that speed, the
electrons behave like waves
with very short wavelengths.
An electron microscope can make
images of much smaller things
than a light microscope
because electrons
have much shorter
wavelengths than light.
The walls of the National
Center for Electron Microscopy
are decorated with photos
of the materials that
have been imaged there.
It's a view into
the nano world where
things are hundreds
of thousands of times
smaller than the
width of a hair.
This is actually our best image.
This is the best that this
microscope can do now.
It's a sheet of carbon atoms
that is just one atom thick.
It's the thinnest non
object you can make.
Each one of these atoms
is bonded very strongly
to its nearest
neighbors and they
form this hexagonal
honeycomb structure.
This sheet of carbon
atoms might one day
replace silicon to make
computers dramatically
faster and smaller.
Other materials Dahman and his
colleagues are studying also
hold great promise.
This is your starting focus?
You're just setting
the starting focus now?
Something like that.
The aluminum alloy
they're looking at today
could one day be used to
build a spaceship to Mars.
In the past,
aluminum alloys have
suffered catastrophic
failures brought
on by tiny atomic wrinkles that
spread through the aluminum
and caused cracking.
That's why researchers
are continuously
in search for
combinations of metals
to mix in with the aluminum.
These clumps of metals,
called precipitates,
serve as a barrier
against cracking.
So this one here is aluminum.
And this one here
is a precipitate.
We know these are the
copper atoms here.
That is quite clear.
And everybody agrees.
But there's some controversy
on whether this is aluminum
and that is magnesium or
whether this is magnesium
and that is aluminum.
And basically, that's
what we want to find out.
It's very delicate.
Figuring out the precipitate's
precise atomic structure
is essential in order to
later test its strength.
So one of the most important
things in all of this
to get the sample into the
right orientation so that you're
looking down a row of atoms.
And it can't be tilted.
If the row of atoms
is slightly tilted,
then you'll wash
out the resolution.
And see what we have.
Promising.
The orientation looks good.
Surprisingly, the basic
structure of this microscope
hearkens back to
the 18th century.
This microscope is functionally
identical to an electron
microscope.
It has a light source.
An electron microscope
has an electron source,
which is a filament.
It has a condenser system,
which would condense
the dispersed rays of light
or to disperse electrons
from the filament of
the electron microscope
down into the column
and onto the sample.
And in our case here, the light
is condensed through this lens
and is transmitted
through the sample,
just like an
electron microscope.
This microscope has an
objective lens here,
the primary magnification lens.
An electron lens
has the same thing.
The difference, of course, is
that for an electron microscope
the lenses are magnetic
fields and electromagnets.
And in a light microscope
like this here,
the lenses are, of
course, made out of glass.
But they both cause a bending
or a refraction of the rays
or the electrons,
whatever the case may be.
But unfortunately, the
bending light rays or electron
beams that magnify
an object also
can make two objects difficult
to distinguish from each other.
The phenomenon that
causes this blurring
is called spherical aberration.
It has to do with the
rays of light that
travel through the middle
versus the rays of light
that travel through the edges of
a spherical surface of a lens,
focusing it at two different
or multiple points in the image
plane up in the body.
That multiple focus
point of the light
going through the objective
decreases resolution
and makes a blurry image.
An electron microscope
corrects spherical aberration
by using magnetic fields
to bend the electron beams.
And that requires a very
stable electrical current.
So in this rack here, we
have the power supplies
for the correctors.
So each of these power supplies
has a very high stability,
very modern electronic system.
Overcoming spherical
aberration is
what has made the
Berkeley microscope's
incredible atomic
resolution possible.
And that's where
it gets its name.
The device is called
the TEAM microscope,
which stands for
Transmission Electron
Aberration-Corrected microscope.
I think we are close.
This is a [INAUDIBLE] magnesium
should be in this position
here and in this position here.
And this should
be aluminum here.
It looks pretty promising to me.
Even so, this microscope
isn't perfect.
In October of 2009,
the center will
unveil the next version
of the TEAM, which
will allow scientists to put
their materials under stresses,
like heat or pressure and
watch the results in real time.
The human need is the need to
understand the physical world,
to understand where we
are and what we're doing
and how it exists.
Back at the beginning
of microscopy,
they did the best
they could, but they
could see a limited amount.
And invention-- that's what
humans do is they invent things
and they make machines
better and more versatile.
