Seeing is believing? No. Seeing is bereaving. Seeing is important to know what things are. But in parallel, we lose something we had.

Seeing is bereaving of our imaginations. When we read a novel, we try not only to understand the story but also to imagine the faces of the characters, the sounds, the colors, and the scenery in the novel. Only the typed letters on each page are the key to the imaginations. Since each of you can imagine and create your own world in your mind, the novel can provide you the story differently. Movies, on the other hand, give us a lot of information directly via a screen and speakers. We can see the colors, the faces, and so on which the authors and the directors want to show. We no longer need imaginations. We receive the same world in our mind. Therefore, our imagination is bereaved by seeing.

In science, seeing is essential to building common visions and knowledge of phenomena, which we want to understand. I think the procedure to build them in science can be divided into two parts: imagination part and verification part. In the imagination part, we imagine how a new phenomenon can occur, and build a theory to seek the possibility. In the verification part, we actually observe the phenomenon and/or measure its properties to change our imaginations to the realities. These two parts can be done in the reverse order. First, a new phenomenon is verified by the observations and/or the measurements. Then we imagine how the phenomenon occurred, and build a theory to describe it as a common knowledge. In science, seeing does not kill our imaginations. Seeing is effectively used to make our imaginary world into the real world.

Optical microscope is one of the tools to see the real world, especially microstructures in biological samples. Since Antonie van Leeuwenhoek observed micro organisms by his hand-made optical microscope in the 17th century, biologists have made tons of discoveries with some developments of the microscope. The combination of the objective lens and the eye lens can change the magnification and the field of view to adjust to the samples size we observe. Scattering light and illumination light were separated by an annular mask to improve the contrast, which is called as dark-field microscopy. The difference of the refractive index is also used by converting to phase difference for the contrast improvement. Besides, fluorescent dyes stain a specific object which we want to observe.

What is the issue of seeing by optical microscope? Optical microscope uses light as a messenger of spatial information from an object to observers. When an objective lens collects the light scattered, reflected or emitted from a sample, the spatial information of the sample is included in the light. However, the light scattered or diffracted out of the pupil of the objective is not collected, that is the spatial information of the sample is lost. Besides, there is the upper limit of spatial frequencies, which can be propagated with light. The limit is caused by the wave nature of light. Therefore, seeing an object by the intermediary of light is bereaving of the spatial information.

(from the introduction of my Doctoral Dissertation)

2018.11

Seeing is Bereaving.