Thanks to the pioneering works of Ashkin and coworkers, optical tweezers (OTs) have become an invaluable tool for myriad studies throughout the natural sciences. Their success relies on the fact that they can be considered as exceptionally sensitive transducers that are able to resolve pN forces and nm displacements, with high temporal resolution, down to s. Hence their application to study a wide range of biological phenomena such as measuring the compliance of bacterial tails, the forces exerted by a single motor protein, and the mechanical properties of human red blood cells and of...