An Institute like ours cannot help but lend credence to the notion of the late Derek J. de Solla Price of Yale University that "the scientific revolution was largely the improvement, invention and use of a series of instruments . . . . that expanded the reach of science in innumerable directions." Most of science today and in years gone by depends on the experimental observation of struc ture on the small scale with microscopes, and on the large scale with telescopes. The first instruments to expand the observational range of the human eye were simple optical systems, designed in the case of...