What did Dickens know about Phaseonium?

Abstract

In the Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens has his character Sam exclaim that he needed “a pair o’ patent double million magnifyin’ gas microscopes of hextra power” Now the general wisdom is that improvements to microscopy are bounded by the laws of optics which tell us that resolution is a function of the wavelength of the radiation used for imaging and inversely proportional to the refractive index of the medium and lens. We have discussed in this space various ways which can and have been used to “circumvent” mother nature, by such tricks as not using lenses and employing scanning techniques instead in order to obtain images.It turns out that there may yet be other useful “loopholes” in natural laws. Lefs for example consider the fact that the refractive index of a material is a measure of the interaction of photons with the matter they traverse. In that sense refraction is related to absorption, which occurs when materials interact so strongly with photons that the latter never emerge.