It is often the case in science that the human imagination can outpace our technical abilities, and the result is that many remarkable inventions are conceived and their basic principles laid out long before anyone has the capability to construct them.
One great example of this is the idea of a negative refractive index material, which I have talked about a number of times on this blog. Such a material would reverse the normal direction of light refraction, and the possibility that such materials might be constructed was first proposed in 1968 by the Russian physicist Victor Vesalago. However, nobody knew how to make such a material at that time, so it was only around the year 2000 that researchers rediscovered Vesalago’s work and demonstrated that it was now feasible to construct negative index materials, ushering in the modern era of metamaterials in optics.
Here, I want to talk about another example that is a little less well-known. In 1928, the Irish physicist Edward Hutchinson Synge proposed a technique for beating the resolution limit of conventional optical systems, in principle to an arbitrary degree! This work essentially laid out the foundations of what would later be known as near-field microscopy, a significant subfield of optics that only took off in the 1980s, some fifty years after Synge’s first publication on the subject appeared. Synge also earned the approval of a particularly famous scientist in the process of publication, as we will see.
So let’s look at Synge’s remarkable discovery! But first, we should talk a bit about why there is a resolution limit in conventional optical systems, which makes Synge’s work so important.
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Skulls in the Stars 