Enlarge / First microscope by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. (credit: Tetra Images/Getty)

In the late 17th century, a Dutch draper and self-taught scientist named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek earned renown for building some of the best microscopes available, at a time when the instrument was just beginning to revolutionize scientific inquiry. He rarely divulged his lens-making methods, however, leading to centuries of speculation as to how he achieved such superior magnifications.

Now neutron tomography has enabled scientists at TU Delft in the Netherlands to peer inside van Leeuwenhoek's microscopes for the very first time. A new paper published in the journal Science Advances reveals that, far from requiring his own secret lens-crafting method, van Leeuwenhoek was a master craftsman who was able to achieve his extraordinary magnifications by honing and perfecting the typical lens production methods of his era.

It's not entirely clear who invented the first bona fide microscope, but contenders for the claim include a late 16th century Dutch maker of spectacles named Zacharias Janssen , a neighboring rival spectacle manufacturer named Hans Lippershey , and a Dutch engineer and inventor named Cornelis Drebbel. Galileo noted the basic principle sometime after 1610, and built his own compound microscope after seeing one of Drebbel's instruments on display in Rome in 1624. He dubbed it the " occhiolino " or " little eye."

Scientists at Brigham Young University (BYU) have created tiny 3D animations out of light that pay homage to Star Trek and Star Wars : tiny versions of the USS Enterprise and a Klingon battle cruiser launching photon torpedoes, as well as miniature green and red light sabers with actual luminous beams. The animations are part of the scientists' ongoing " Princess Leia project "—so dubbed because it was partly inspired by the iconic moment in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope when R2D2 projects a recorded 3D image of Leia delivering a message to Obi-Wan Kenobi. They described the latest advances on their so-called screenless volumetric display technologies in a recent paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.

"What you're seeing in the scenes we create is real; there is nothing computer generated about them," said co-author Dan Smalley, a professor of electrical engineering at BYU. "This is not like the movies, where the lightsabers or the photon torpedoes never really existed in physical space. These are real, and if you look at them from any angle, you will see them existing in that space."

The technology making this science fiction a potential reality is known as an optical trap display (OTD). These are not holograms; they're volumetric images, as they can be viewed from any angle as they seem to float in the air. A holographic display scatters light across a 2D surface, and microscopic interference patterns make the light look as if it is coming from objects in front of, or behind, the display surface. So with holograms, one must be looking at that surface to see the 3D image. In contrast, a volumetric display consists of scattering surfaces distributed throughout the same 3D space occupied by the resulting 3D image. That means when you look at the image, you are also viewing the scattered light.