2 Oct 2019
Nick Marsh analyses what takes place when we peer into a microscope to analyse material, leading him to a very philosophical and out-of-this-world conclusion.
Nick Marsh
Job Title
“We are literally made from stars; it is as if the universe itself manifested in the form of life,” says Nick. “We are the universe, and when we try to understand the universe, we’re trying to understand ourselves.” Image © den-belitsky / Adobe Stock
I switch on the microscope…
Photons begin to stream from the bulb at the bottom and, although most of them escape to bounce around the room, a few head straight upwards, where they are reflected by the condenser through the glass slide on the stage.
Fewer still shoot up through the objective lens, which warps and bends them, magnifying the image they now carry. They bounce around the head of the microscope and eventually exit through the ocular lenses, magnifying them still further.
Even now many photons escape into the room, but a few pass through my glasses, my cornea, and my lens – all of which bend and distort them further.
They fly through the blood vessels at the back of my eye and finally activate millions of photoreceptors – each firing in response to slightly different amplitudes and wavelengths, sending information about this in the form of electrical signs through millions more nerve cells.
From there on it gets a little complicated, but somewhere inside the 1.4kg mass of neurones and myelin inside my skull, the whole mess is sorted out, a pattern is recognised and I begin to dictate my report about the mast cell tumour I’m looking at.
The mast cells that comprise the bulk of the material on my slide, and which have led me to this conclusion, were sucked out of a skin mass on a dog several hundred miles away, transported to me, and now here I am; a coordinated mass of cells (all right, barely coordinated, although I have had some coffee by this point) staring down at the slide.
A good friend recently pointed out to me that my job basically comprises cells looking at cells. What a strange way to spend my life – a flawed clump, mostly made of water, looking at stuff sucked out of other flawed clumps of mostly water, and trying to form an understanding of what is going on inside them.
It strikes me as a microcosm of the truth the late and sadly-missed Carl Sagan pointed out 40 years ago: all the atoms that make up our bodies were forged in the heart of suns billions of years ago – all of which have long since burnt out.
We are literally made from stars; it is as if the universe itself manifested in the form of life – we are the universe, and when we try to understand the universe, we’re trying to understand ourselves.
I am a collection of cells, trying to understand cells: it’s as close to a philosophy as you’ll ever find me expounding in this otherwise hostile, unfair and driverless universe in which we find ourselves. I don’t know if the thought is useful, profound or frankly even very interesting to anyone else, but it makes me feel a little dizzy.
If nothing else, it makes me feel some peace when I recognise a pattern that means the particular collection of cells from which the material on my slide has been aspirated hasn’t got long left to enjoy the world, at least in the form that it is now.
