Expedition Into the Nanoworld

1. A Curious premise
“My grandma was a beautiful woman…”. This chapter tells about the motivation to decide to do research in life and why with the optical microscope.

2. Just observe! The optical microscope to observe living systems, from organs to proteins. The challenge from its invention to “tomorrow” to decipher cancer and neurological disorders. 3.The colours of the rainbow We all live under the rainbow, colours are delivering the energy needed to explore the living by watching. 4. The sharpener of the light When a curved piece of glass meets the light allows to see those fine dietails hidden to the eyes. 5. A three-dimensional world

Flatlandia is a novel, the real world is developed along three spatial dimensions and the optical microscope can produce three-dimensional animated “postcard” by simply changing the lens focus when observing around.

6. Modern times: the space and time of observations Time is the fourth dimension that increases the budget of information at our disposal to understand what’s going on at different time time and space scales. 7. Two photon are better than one Quantum mechanics allows to start a joyful revolution in optical microscopy with relevant implicantions in medicine and biology. Two photon is a unique entity. 8. Super eyes to see beyond physical limits Laws of physics limit the perfomances of the light microscope. No doubts. The image reconstrution channel has no limits if you are able to add information and the optical microscope an unlimited super power to visualize details. 9. Without a net Now is time to remove the net. We are skilled enough. So lets control the shape of light to get information without fluorescent labes. 10. The liquid microscope of the future Illumination produces multiple messages tuning across time and space scales and artificial intelligence can merge them to deciphering nature. Liquid tunable microscopy could provide the opportunity to see things differently and to change our point of view, abandoning the obsession of representing the “real world” we have in mind when forming an image. Lets see further!

11. Pop microscopy
“Grown-ups never understand anything on their own, and it is tiring for children to always have to give them explanations. “We use nice images to bring you to instruments and applications like in a pop song that people whistle in the shower.

12. Acknowledgments It is a love narration in the love story between a curved piece of glass and the rainbow.

Author Biography

Alberto Diaspro isFull Professor of Applied Physics at the Department of Physics at Genoa University, Scientific Director of the Nanoscopy research program at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), and Academic of the Ligurian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He is Member of the New York Academy of Sciences. He has served as President of OWLS and EBSA and as Appointed Vice President of ICO. He founded LAMBS (Laboratory for Advanced Microscopy, Bioimaging and Spectroscopy) in 2003. Professor Diaspro is responsible for designing and realizing the first Italian multiphoton microscope (1999) and a hybrid artificial “nanobiorobot” (2000-2005). He directed the design and realization of the first Italian nanoscopy architecture at IIT (2008). His current research is on chromatin organization in the cell nucleus and multimodal optical microscopy and image spectroscopy sensing. He has published more than 350 papers, >16000 citations, and H=60 (source Google Scholar). He is Editor-in-Chief of the international peer revied journal Microscopy Research and Technique. He is SPIE fellow, Senior Member of IEEE and OSA, and Editorial Board Member of the Biophysical Journal. He received the Emily M. Gray Award in 2014 and the Award for Scientific Communication from the Italian Physical Society in 2019. Since 2016, Professor Diaspro is President of the Scientific Council of the “Festival of Science” (www.festivalscienza.it). Since 2021 he is President of SIBPA, the italian society of pure and applied biophysics.