Question: Can you see a particle in a microscope?

Ian Hands-Portman answered on 20 Mar 2014:

It depends on what you mean by particle! If I sit down with a sample and start using the microscopes, if we zoom in about two hundred times we’d see cells like the one that make up our bodies, zoom in a thousand times and we’re looking at bacteria.

A bit further in – about 30,000 x we’d be in the range of viruses – when I’m talking to other virologists, we’d call those ‘particles’ and go on and on about how many particles, counting particles etc.

at 50,000 to 80,000 we’re looking at proteins – individual ( but very big ) molecules – if I’m talking to someone who looks at proteins and enzymes, we call those particles too.

If I crank the magnification right up to a million or more we’re starting to see atoms – carbon atoms and metal atoms show up very well and to a materials scientist those might be called particles.

That’s as far as my microscopes go – we’d have to go to a physics lab to start looking at the things that make up the atoms – protons, neutrons and electrons – they call those particles too!

Finally if we went all the way to the LHC and threw Brian Cox off his computer for a while we might get to look at the bits that make up the bits that make up atoms – and those are also called particles.

So I guess the answer to your question is yes we can – everyone calls everything a particle!