Can Microscopes Be Trusted for Cancer or Other Diseases? (ED/OP)
By Louise Orrock
In 2012, a few months after two cancer scares of my own, I guessed that all diagnosed diseases were fictions. I sent paragraphs, and later essays, to a number of people asking, could a cell travel from one part of the body to another, could an x-ray really see through the skin, why would viral cells destroy their host, could any number of invisibly small things cause harm, and did the account of how they altered cells make sense (as well as, later, was DNA philosophically compatible with living matter, in other words, was there a satisfactory account of how the body interpreted the instructions within it?). However, it wasn't until later that I looked more closely at magnifying glasses and microscopes.
Anyone who uses a camera will probably agree that although a zoom brings an object closer, you cannot magnify much more than twice without losing so much clarity that the object becomes unidentifiable. Slide projection produces a larger clear image but not one larger than the object itself (of what was photographed). I have observed enough using my own microscope, a Prinz 2801, to be certain that what is on the slide at most will appear as a pale image of the stain over an otherwise relatively unchanged image and that variations can be accounted for by parts of the slide appearing as patterns of light and dark and by variations in illumination. Is the unchanging image one sees of a hidden object? When I turn the microscope upside down, behind the glass at the end of the three small objective lens tubes I see what look like orange bird irises. I had already thought that one saw the lens of one’s own eye (the cornea) towards the top of the microscope cylinder and that the fixed image below this resembled it in structure. However, the microscope is indestructible, and I found no object in another microscope I acquired recently that comes in two parts (the Sunagor MagnaScope), so I thought more about the theoretical limits to enlargement, whatever microscopes might or might not contain and when they are not hollow.
One can account for enlargement, although I am not a physicist, by first acknowledging from observation and deduction that magnification is reflection and that the image enlarges because as we lift a magnifying lens from a piece of paper, for the same angle of reflection from a convex lens an increasingly larger area is reflected so that a smaller individual object, re-reflected at the same angle, will appear as a larger reflection on the other side of the lens, the point of curvature (where the lens converge) being before the center of the lens, since only a part of the reflected image will be re-reflected. The image will become smaller when the original angle, or ratio, increases to the point that the re-reflected image becomes smaller or further enlargement may be restricted (as is the case also with Sunagor and the Prinz), by the rim (or funnel or lens tube), which determines the angle along with convexity. Otherwise, blurring will occur because of over-enlargement or under-illumination or there will be a return to normal size if we move the lens closer to the eye. Although, before then, we are not viewing the object directly, the width of the lens of our eye may be a factor in the image sometimes turning upside down, and in apparent magnification in general, because parts of the reflected image are no longer in our direct vision (as when objects beyond a glass of water may appear within it as displaced from left to right), as may reflection in the eye and the different resistances of the two media, glass and eye. Some time ago, I calculated that hypothetical enlargement of what was on the Prinz slide would only be 3.3 times. Although the calculation may prove wrong (for instance, the angle is based on hypothetical light projection from the mirror rather than from an unknown convex lens within the microscope or from the plane glass at the end of the objective lens tube), what one sees reflected within the microscope is at low magnification/reflection and it would be impossible to see a speck on the slide under the lens enlarged to the width of the lens or the tube aperture.
