San Antonio College Library

There's an entire world you cannot see with the human eye alone. Since 1590 microscopes have been helping doctors diagnose, and allowing students to observe the minuscule. Now, one of those students is helping to cross another frontier, taking microscopes out of the lab and putting them in the hands of anyone with a smartphone.

Two major questions motivate this study: How do new devices get taken up as experimental systems by scientists? How does the adoption of new instruments affect scientific knowledge? Many ramifications emerge from these two simple questions. Among these are historical questions about how, by whom, and why new instruments are introduced, or about how another, different set of instruments might be adopted given alternative social and cultural circumstances....

"For fans of the "Who Was" series, this lively, accessible, and full-color chapter book biography shows how a self-taught scientist was the first to observe the microbial life in and around us. By building his own microscope, Antony van Leeuwenhoek advanced humanity's understanding of our oft-invisible world around us."-- Invisible organisms called microbes are everywhere: in soil, oceans, and snow; in the food we eat and the air we breathe - even...