1 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Biology, Chemistry, Neuroscience, Medicine, Psychology
Good point, and agreed, which is why my question avoids mention of human eyes. Microbes might need field of vision measured in nanometers or micrometers (for our purposes of viewing atoms), instead of a human field of vision of macro scale meters.
Dragonfly eyes[1] which have smaller eyes than humans seem to even have a wider field of vision than us, so we might be able to get creative here.
1: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2013.12914
Merely asking in the spirit of the OP that invites the creativity:
Is something a bit too speculative for a typical /r/AskScience post? No question is too big or small for AAW. In this thread you can ask any science-related question! Things like: "What would happen if...", "How will the future...", "If all the rules for 'X' were different..."
Also in the spirit of Einstein's approach[2], let's imagine 'what if' microbes could each somehow use their bodies as individual sensors and then coordinate to assemble into a larger sensor as a superorganism[3], if hypothetically an existing type of microbe could do so.
3: https://www.science-frontiers.com/sf133/sf133p08.htm
What would it take for such microbes to see atoms? Is it feasible? Within the realm of possibility?
Edit: reminder again that perhaps this question might need biology to team up with physics. 🥂
Comment by Hard-To_Read at 17/01/2024 at 19:45 UTC
6 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Visual perception of atoms is difficult to imagine because atoms are in constant motion and the idea of vision based on reflected light doesn't apply in the case of a single atom, or at least doesn't apply in the same way. "Vision" at that small of a scale would be unlike any other vision we know about from animals. The "eye" would need to both emit and somehow detect electrons, like we do in transmission electron microscopy. This would not be possible by a single cell unless the cell bent around atoms such that it could be both emitter and detector at the same time. It's difficult to imagine how something that complex would evolve naturally in a stepwise fashion. Evolution would likely stumble into a more beneficial solution to detecting atoms based on the chemosensory senses long before electron transmission emerged as a natural ability. Further, atomic information is of little consequence to the survival and biological fitness of living organisms.
Thank you for the thought-provoking question.