How did we come to discover the universe of things, living and dead, too small to see with the naked eye?  Starting with Robert Hooke's spectacularly illustrated and reasoned 1665 book Micrographia, we will explore the history of our knowledge of that world and of microscopic imaging technology, the principles of optics that allow them to function, and what limits their performance. We will look at the 1890s work of Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the Nobel prize-winner and generally seen as the last great microphysiologist. We will look at examples of post-optical microscopy and the surprises they reveal. We will examine the long history of belief in and later evidence for much smaller, sub-microscopic things: molecules and atoms. This course is hands-on and students will use their microscopes with their cell phones to compile images, and study one microscopic subject area extensively. They will present their collection to the class, and in doing so situate their interpretations in the history of interpretations of micro subjects.Science and Math (SCIMA) courses develop students' capacity for evidence-based reasoning through the study of life, earth, and physical sciences and of computational and theoretical mathematics. In these courses, students learn to recognize and interpret meaningful patterns of information; to assess the validity of empirical claims, distinguishing between opinion and fact; and to understand the sociocultural relevance of scientific and mathematical thinking.

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