Dr George Aranda on Robert Hooke

This brings us to our first speaker, Dr George Aranda, who is a research fellow at Deakin University, conducting research into science education, science communication, and putting 3D printers into primary schools. He is president of the Victorian chapter of the Australian Science Communicators and curator of the blog, Science Book A Day. He also makes ice cream. For fun. You should try his triple chocolate gelato, and he's learning to play cold chisel on the ukulele. George. Hi. Thank you for coming out on this warm Melbourne evening. If you're a bit cold, give a hug to the person next to you. I'm sure they'll appreciate that. Now, good evening. My name is George Aranda. I do make ice cream for fun, but why else would you make ice cream? I really want to thank you all for coming out tonight. I saw a number of beanies of people coming out, so it's a real effort to come out tonight, so thank you very much. I'm really happy to be the first presenter tonight in what I think will be a great night of science storytelling. Now, when I was first asked to put together a presentation tonight, I was really happy when I found out they wanted presentations on light, because there are so many ways that light can be related to science. So whether it's through psychology or physics or chemistry or cosmology, the choices are endless. So I decided to focus my presentation on the development of a research tool that relies on light itself, something that is so ubiquitous you can buy it at a children's toy store. I'm talking about the microscope, and in particular the development of the microscope in relation to a seminal piece of work, Micrographia, which was published by Robert Hooke in 1665, exactly 350 years ago. Now, if you look above me, Robert, our projectionist, has put some of the images from Micrographia to astound you, so look out for those. Now, Hooke lived between 1635 and 1703. He studied at Oxford and was an assistant to Robert Boyle. Not a bad gig if you can get it. He was reputed to have a keen eye and was skilled at mathematics. Now, he was a scientist with wide-ranging interests. This included work in mechanics, discovering the law of elasticity. He worked in gravity. He studied horology, which is also known as the science of timekeeping. He studied paleontology, astronomy, and memory, and, of course, microscopy. He was also a surveyor of the City of London and was critically important in the rebuilding of the city after the Great Fire of 1666. Now, the Royal Society was formed in 1660, and he eventually became its curator, which basically meant he was able to put demonstrations on, experiments, sometimes of his own design and sometimes of other members of the Royal Society, so he really got the chance to work in a number of different fields. The notes indicate that he did work relating to the nature of fluids, blood, gravity, and air pressure. His work on the microscope was eventually collated into what became Micrographia and became the first publication of the Royal Society. Now, the book Micrographia has a wonderful subtitle, Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. Unsurprising that we call it Micrographia these days. Now, Samuel Pepys called it the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life, which is a pretty good review, I'd say. Now, you have to remember that some of the things I'm going to be talking about were done in the 1600s. At the time the observations were made, looking through a microscope was largely done with the aid of sunlight or candlelight. Now, if you ever looked through a microscope, and the last time I looked through a microscope I was in Year 8, and me and my lab partner were able to discern one fuzzy blob next to another fuzzy blob. So you've really got to take into account what kind of conditions Hooke was working with at the time. You also have to remember that no one had seen images like this before. Now you can just go onto the internet and easily find a microscopic image of a hemoglobin from the pin of a needle, just as easily as you can find internet pictures of cats. And finally, you have to remember that even learned members of the Royal Society didn't really think that life existed on the scale of the observations that Hooke was making. So it was a very different time. Now, Robert Hooke didn't invent the microscope. That prize goes to... Well, we don't know exactly. As you can imagine, lots of people were working in this field at the time. So we can't say definitively who invented the microscope. But there is some evidence that Dutch eyeglass makers were responsible for the first compound microscope in the 1590s. In particular, Hans Leperchy and Zacharias Jensen, who were also said to have developed the telescope. They did the microscope and the telescope. Now, I love that in a PR kind of way. Sick of seeing really big things light years away? Well, have we got a new invention for you. From the people that bought you the telescope, we now bring you the microscope. Tagline, keeping it small. Now, for the trivia buffs out there wondering who came up with the name microscope, it was attributed to Giovanni Faber, who coined the term for Galileo's compound microscope in 1625. Galileo named it occhiolino, or little eye. So you'll need that next trivia night that you go to. Now, how does the microscope work? Well, basically for today's purposes, it is a series of one or more lenses that is used to enlarge something that's really small within a focal plane. Now, as you can imagine, a telescope works largely in the same way, just kind of the other way around, making really big things really small. And that always reminds me of that time of life when you're experimenting with different things. I remember I was, I think, in grade 2 or grade 3, and I don't know how, I ended up getting a telescope. Maybe my dad or my uncle had it. It might have been binoculars even. And you know that time of life when you get a telescope for the first time, you start looking at things. You look at the moon. You look at the sun. Don't look at that. Okay. You look at the neighbours. Don't look at that. Okay, fine. Looking at my sister. Don't look at that. And you get a bit bored. Things are going out of focus, and so you kind of think, I wonder if I turn it around, and I have a look through, and everything's really tiny. And it's going, mm. Did anyone else do that? No, okay. Maybe it was just me. I don't know. Now, at the start of the 1600s, things were being done with non-living things, and as you can imagine, the lenses at that time could only take us so far. In fact, the first detailed account of the inside of something that had once been alive was based on using a microscope, didn't appear until 1644, and that was with Odierno's Locio della Mosca, or the fly's eye. Now, before we get to micrographia, I think I should really talk about Antoine van, I'm going to get this wrong, Leeuwenhoek, who is said to be the father of microbiology. Now, he was a contemporary of Hooke, and it is really his work that started our understanding of the microbiological world. He made the first reports of single-celled organisms, bacteria, the structure of cells and blood flow in capillaries, and spermatoza. Now, to me, van Leeuwenhoek represents the great nature of science in two particular ways. First, he developed lenses better than any lenses at that time. Now, he didn't do this to solve some greater question of humanity in terms of science. He did this so that he could get a better look at the threads of cotton he was selling in his drapery. How practical is that? And I love that about science, that while with science we're trying to use things like large hadron collider to answer the bigger questions in life, but science has also pushed forward by answering those little questions in life. How good is my cotton? That's what he was answering. And the second part that I love was that he's now developed these state-of-the-art lenses, and you can imagine, if you're at home and you've done something like that, and you're in your bedroom, and you're, my God, look at that, there's little things everywhere. And so he started doing that, going around, looking at wood, looking at microphones, maybe not a microphone, but other things around his daily life, and he'd spat in a bowl, and he'd looked at that, and he'd got some blood, and he'd looked at that, and urine and other bodily fluids, he'd checked it all out. And I love that enthusiasm with science, that, and if you've ever been around a scientist when they've got data, oof, Susie, hold my calls, I've got data. It's great. Now, you have to also imagine, sorry, I'll step back. Now, he never claimed to be a scientist. Get a drapery shot, I'm not a scientist. And he never wrote a scientific paper, but we have records from the 500 odd letters that he wrote to the Royal Society. In fact, his findings were so astounding that they were discounted by the Royal Society for some time, until members actually went down and verified the veracity of his claims, and changed the microbiological world forever. Now to Micrographia. The book itself contains some 284 pages, and we're going to go through it tonight. So everyone, settle in. Security, lock the doors. Now, I'm going to go through a few examples. Now, the book itself is divided into sections that look at everyday objects, living objects such as plants and animals, and observations that he had about the nature of light and celestial bodies. Now, that's Van Leeuwenhoek there, and what hopefully will come up next, there we go, is an image of a razor blade. Now, it's the image, the circular image with a thing through the middle that is his drawing of razor blades. And I will quote from the book itself. Appeared much rougher than the other, looking almost like a ploughed field, with many parallels, ridges and furrows, and a cloddy, as it were, or an uneven surface. Nor shall we wonder at the roughness of those surfaces. I have, when the sun has shone well on them, discovered their surface to be variously raised or scratched, and to consist of an infinite of small broken surfaces which reflect the light of very various and differing colours. Now, I think this is a really interesting passage because it really gives us insight into what people were thinking of at the time. So you could imagine that they considered razor blades sharp and uniform and man-made. But when they had a closer look, they could really see how rough and not smooth things were. He even recorded rust that was on some of the razor blades. And the image on the right there is from a scanning electron microscope, again of a razor blade. And you can see, even with our modern razor-making techniques, it's still a bit jagged, and may give you pause for when you actually shave next time. That's what you're The next image that I thought I would put up is of a slice of cork on the left there. And basically, Hooke was the person who used cell in reference to science for the first time when making observations about a slice of cork. And I quote, I could exceedingly plainly perceive it to be all perforated and porous, much like a honeycomb, but that the pores of it were not regular. These pores, or cells, were indeed the first microscopical pores I ever saw, and perhaps they were ever seen, for I had not met with any writer or person that had made any mention of them before this. Now this is an important passage, because he goes on to speculate what the pores might have to do with some of the actual physical characteristics of cork. Meaning we can squeeze cork, and it bounces back generally. And he was speculating about that, and the nature of it being able to float, being used in things like fishing nets to keep them to the surface of the water. And you can see kind of in his mind, he's starting to think about the microscopic characteristics of things, and how that influences their macroscopic properties. And he did this by making observations about the shape of thorns and nettles, and other things that could be examined through microscopy. Now in the final example I'd like to use is perhaps one of the most famous images, is that of the flea from Micrographia. And he writes this. The strength and beauty of this small creature, had it no other relation at all to man, would deserve a description. But, as for the beauty of it, the microscope manifests it to be all over adorned with a curiously polished suit of sable armour, neatly jointed and beset with multitudes of sharp pins, shaped almost like porcupine quills. Isn't that great? That's a fantastic description. And I really think it gives you insight into the reverence that Hooke had for the creatures he was looking with his newfound perspective. And he uses such beautiful metaphors. I think you'd be hard pressed to find the term polished suit of sable armour in any modern scientific journal these days. But what about today? Obviously a lot of things have changed and developed since the publication of Micrographia. And these advances all benefit and are limited by the nature of light. With modern optical microscopes limited to a practical resolution of about 200 nanometres. Next image please. There we go. Now as you can see, we have an image of a fly's head. Now this is made possible by scanning electron microscopy. Which gives us a very different perspective on the small compared to Hooke's optical microscope and uses electrons themselves to build up an image of an object. It has a resolution of under a nanometre. But still developments are being made in the area of optical microscopy with the next image being made possible by a technique called fluorescence microscopy. And this involves objects within the sample being tagged with a fluorescent marker and different wavelengths of light bringing out different features. Now the people who developed this technique were awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry just last year. But what would Hooke make of all this? I think he would have been astounded at the beauty and simplicity of the microscopic world and no doubt unsurprised by its underlying complexity. And I end with a quote from Robert Hooke himself which sums it all up for me. By the help of microscopes there is nothing so small as to escape our inquiry. Hence, there is a new visible world discovered to the understanding. Thank you very much.