Microscopes reveal the invisible threads that hold the world together
By Katy Börner, Elizabeth G. Record, Todd N. Theriault | Published: 2025-10-27 14:30:00 | Source: Hard Science – Big Think
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In 2020, during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, many people had a deeply emotional, highly personal, and perhaps somewhat obsessive relationship with the microscope. Even if you’re not familiar with this concept, every day—perhaps several times a day—you’ve probably looked anxiously through the microscope lens of your choice, and what you’ve seen determines whether your day will be one marked by anxiety or relief, hope or despair.
Your macroscope is likely one of many web-based coronavirus (COVID-19) dashboard tools that have tracked the spread of the virus. Depending on your interests, you may have chosen a global tracker, such as the one found at Global Health Organization; National model, such as those of Johns Hopkins or Center for Disease Control; Or a more local tracker like the one you produce State Department of Health.
At a time when it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by information, these coronavirus microscopes have brought order and insight. They took a huge amount of data and made it readable and usable through visualization. The labyrinthine spreadsheets have become elegant graphs and maps that clearly convey coronavirus trends and its geospatial spread.
Equally important, these microscopes respected the human dimension of the data by making it interactive, almost tangible. You can filter data to make personal decisions for you and your family, or you can direct your search to monitor the condition of your loved ones in other locations. No wonder our first experiences with the microscope were, for many, as deeply emotional as they were informative.
As its name suggests, a macroscope is a tool for creating large-scale entities (Total-(visible to the eye)range). This term began to appear in scientific literature in the 1950s, but received its full expression in Joel de Rosnay’s 1979 book, The microscope: a new global scientific order. For de Rosnay, a French biologist and computer scientist who is keenly focused on the future of research technology, the microscope will be “a symbol of a new way of seeing and understanding.” It was intended to be an instrument “used not to magnify or reduce things, but to observe what is too great, too slow, and too complex for our eyes.”
Having collected, supported and promoted microscopes as custodians of Places and spaces Gallery for over a decade and have been written about as co-authors of Atlas of macroscopesWe’ve seen firsthand the power and potential of interactive data visualizations.
The microscopes in the exhibition and accompanying book combine high-quality data sets, computational power, and data visualization techniques to provide a big picture of topics that are often too large and too complex to understand from an individual perspective. Whether it’s the structure of the universe, weather patterns around the world, healthcare inequalities, or refugee migration routes, macroscopes can help understand patterns, trends, or outliers in data.
When faced with highly complex topics, the macroscope’s mantra is: “It’s complex, but not incoherent.” This is what makes macroscopes necessary at this moment in time.
In an era of global pandemics, worldwide environmental disasters, and destabilizing international conflicts, we are reminded daily that we exist within a deeply interconnected global network. Some of the most powerful forces shaping our lives will not be simple, local, and linear; It will be multi-causal, far-reaching, and hydra-headed. Above all, it will contain many, many more a lot of moving parts.
To understand this tangle of connections and possibilities, many microscopists use computational models to reveal key economic, medical, political, educational or environmental relationships that are often invisible to all but experts.
Consider, for example, the global food supply chain. We may all intuitively understand how grape blight in Italy could lead to wine shortages in Europe. What is less clear is how a US soybean shock could hurt pork production as far away as Panama, Egypt and Indonesia. But these are just the types of dependencies that become apparent when you interact with them The full pictureGlobal supply chain microscope Complexity Science Center In Vienna, Austria. Using a large set of production and trade data, along with a network model that takes into account both food and the materials needed to produce it, this microscope depicts the effects of local shocks on agricultural production in specific markets around the world. Through intuitive functionality and elegant design, it powerfully conveys the interconnected nature of our global society.
Macroscopes are well suited to receiving data from complex systems, identifying patterns through analysis, and revealing vital relationships that may be obscured by the size and complexity of that system. This ability is especially needed when dealing with a difficult social problem for which there are no clear causes or proven solutions. During the height of the opioid epidemic in the United States, National Center for Opinion Research In partnership with Appalachian Regional Commission To create Appalachian overdose mapping tool. This interactive dashboard collected a wealth of drug deaths and demographic data that allowed users to compare county-level overdose rates with the socioeconomic conditions in that area.
Like most large microscopes, the Appalachian Overdose Mapping Tool is designed to be useful to experts but also accessible. Its intuitive interface and easy interaction allow a wide range of users to dig deeper into the data and begin pursuing their own lines of inquiry. Broad access to data means that everyone, from researchers, journalists and policy makers to healthcare providers, community leaders and families on the front lines of the crisis, can all make informed decisions about where limited resources can best be directed. In fact, the mapping tool proved so useful that the Department of Agriculture commissioned A National version It will be built in 2020.
As portals to ever-evolving data, macroscopes can serve as windows into the dynamics of any terrain—personal or professional, local or global—offering essential insights into our surroundings and even our place in the universe. This amazing topical range becomes apparent even with a cursory glance at the topics covered by the microscopes in Atlas of macroscopes and an exhibition of places and spaces, including:
Microscopes also cater to a wide range of interests, including astronomy (The cosmic web), ornithology (Decipher the mystery of the shape of the egg), news (Watson News Explorer), politics (Urine speculum), date (the date) and culture (culture chart), to name a few.
Although macroscopes are tools for intellectual exploration and discovery first and foremost, they are often capable of stunning beauty. Barabasi Laboratory Nature 150for example, conveys the importance of intellectual impact by creating a galaxy-like network of scientific papers and allowing users to travel through its colorful collections of nodes and links.
In another place are the graceful lines and bright colors with which the microscope depicts landby Cameron Picario, depicts global weather patterns giving them a beauty that rivals your favorite Impressionist paintings.
Macroscopes can be a vehicle for the kind of intellectual pleasure that comes with gaining new knowledge, discovering a hidden connection, or arriving at a new insight, but they can also be a lot of fun to play with. Mattan Stopper the date It features a time spiral of important events that takes users on an amazing journey extending billions of years into the past.
another microscope, River runner By Sam Learner It allows users to place a drop of water anywhere in the world and follow it as it makes its way through streams, tributaries and rivers, following a path to the ocean or inland sea. We may all know that flowing water respects no city limits, state lines, or national borders, but once we begin our water-centered River Runner journey, we understand on an experiential level the way our shared resources bind us together.
It is this message of interconnectedness, and the reminder that natural and intellectual resources tend to transcend the boundary lines we draw around them, that may represent the most important contribution of macroscopes. In a deeply interconnected world, all challenges are shared because all destinies are intertwined. To see this, we need a macroscopic perspective – one that includes both component and system, detail and context, local action, and global ramifications. Otherwise, complexity may remain only felt, not visible.
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