Embiggening

At one kilometre away, a large house looks tiny, taking up less than one degree on the horizon. A grouse, 30 metres away, looks the same size. So does a mouse, seen from a distance of 6 metres or so, and I imagine that from 7 centimetres, a louse would fill the same angle. The catch is that if our eyes were only 7 cm away from it, many of us would have trouble seeing the louse in focus.

We can focus our eyes because each eye has a squishy lens that the eye muscles squeeze until you see a sharp image on the retina at the back of the eyeball. Move up really close to the house, grouse, mouse or louse, and the image blurs, because the lens in your eye can’t squish enough. When that happens, we need another lens to help.

The standard Sherlock Holmes image from the movies (above, left) shows the wrong way to use a magnifying glass. The correct way (right) has different relative positions for the eye and the lens, and as well, the thing being examined is moved closer. When you use a lens, it is as though your eye is hovering just above the grouse feather or whatever, but still able to bring the image into sharp focus.

My mate Warren Bonnett, once the extraordinary owner of Embiggen Books in Melbourne, and an earlier shop of the same name in Noosaville told me that we have The Simpsons to thank for ‘embiggen’.

I have no idea where ‘smallify’ and ‘smallification’ came from, but they seem to be a decade old. Lenses can also smallify things: if you use binoculars and telescopes in reverse, things look tiny. I used to teach physics, meaning I could explain that, but it’s complicated, so I won’t. Look it up! Still, there’s usually precious little need for smallification.

We might smallify a blue whale, so we could take it all in, but we don’t, because we curious apes are quite good at seeing the bits of something large, and stitching the bits together in our minds. We need embiggeners like microscopes, even simple ones, much more often, but occasionally, it’s hard to see the big picture.

Here are some microscopes:

USB micro-camera, binocular (dissecting) microscope, monocular microscope.

I recommend that beginners start with either a hand lens or a clip-on. The cost is so low that almost anybody can play, and that gets you started. Later, you can move up to microscopes. Young people (and most older people) don’t know where to find interesting material, or how to catch things or how to handle what they catch, so this is a field biologist’s guide, delivering the necessary what, where and how, with a lot of why, and a dash of who and when.

But while I put a lot of efforts into using clip-ons like the GoPro,