Today I Learned (TIL)

6549 readers

28 users here now

You learn something new every day; what did you learn today?

/c/til is a community for any true knowledge that you would like to share, regardless of topic or of source.

Share your knowledge and experience!

Rules

Information must be true
Follow site rules
No, you don't have to have literally learned the fact today
Posts must be about something you learned

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

TIL A microscope can simply be reversed to make a telescope. Both telescopes and microscopes were in use in Holland by the end of the sixteenth century (www.bristol.ac.uk)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

top 6 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

Optical Emgineer reporting in.

This is bullshite.

Read for yourselves:
https://www.quora.com/Can-we-use-a-microscope-as-a-telescope-by-just-inverting-it

What you can learn today is, that if you use a microscope "the other way around", something big is imaged into somethjng small on the focal plane.
Zeiss, a company that manufactures a shitton of optical stuff, has a very successful semi-conductor branch. That branch started off when some engineers from the microscope-department fiddled around with " inverted" microscopes during their lunchtime to create the first optics for lithography from Zeiss.

Source: i worked there. I know those engineers.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I'm a microbiologist and the first thing I thought is this is a person with a homework question asking why you can't flip a microscope to make a telescope. What better way to get the right answer than to confidently proclaim on the Internet bad information as fact? Then I was it's a bot copying content from Reddit and now feel gross.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Tbh that's in a modern sense, historically a microscope was just a single lense, which could be used for both (as far as I know). And the Dutch had the best lense makers and innovators that developed the optie technology early on.

[–] voracitude 4 points 5 months ago

I'm thinking about going back to school. What did you have to study to get into optical engineering? Is it a branch of mechanical engineering? And what's the daily like in that field?

[–] WhiteOakBayou 5 points 5 months ago

If I look through the big hole in the bottom I just see two points of light. Down voted.

[–] CookieOfFortune 5 points 5 months ago

Maybe in the simplest sense but it’d be pretty difficult to do either with a modern device.