Science and antakshari have much in common, fathered as they are through the simple act of biding time. The human mind turns curious when it idles, when it is not burdened with the anxiety of scouring for the next meal. Soon, the eyes adjust and you look up, and then down, and try to make sense of the world around you. But how do you satiate the curiosity of wanting to know the workings of the inner world, a world that you know exists but one that you cannot see. How do you look within?

The search for an answer to this question begins in ancient Syria and India with the concept of glass and the lens and the understanding of their potential. Glass, for example, finds a mention in the Yajurveda (1200 BCE) as well as the ancient Buddhist texts of Satapatha Brahmana and Vinaya Pitaka. Lens has a more chequered history. The eponymous Nimrud Lens, it has been suggested, was used as part of a telescope by the ancient Syrians (710 BCE). On the other hand, Book III of the Nyaya Sutra (650 BCE) begins thus: A sense is not soul because we can apprehend an object through both sight and touch. Then transpires a scintillating debate on visual perception that contains the following, now iconic, shloka (45):

Aprapya grahanam kachabhrapatalsphatikantaritopalabdheh

"Some say that the eye can perceive a thing even without coming in contact with it by means of its rays, just as things screened from us by glass, mica, membrane, or crystal are seen."

The story of modern optics is incomplete without mentioning the contribution of the tenth century Arab polymath Ibn Al-Haythm and his phenomenal Kitab e Manazir, or Book of Optics. And citing Ibn Al-Haythm is incomplete without the mention of his legendary predecessor Ibn Sahl, now credited with discovering the law of refraction, commonly referred to as the Snell's Law.

Humans, separated by culture and geography, had begun to make sense of light and optics. The development of elemental microscope integrands, however, began a little earlier, when the Romans, while looking through glass of divergent shapes and sizes, came across one that was thick in the middle and thin at the edges. They discovered that an object placed below such a "lens” appeared enlarged. These early lenses were called magnifiers or ‘burning glasses’. Around the same time, the Roman philosopher and satirist Seneca described magnification by a globe of water. Lenses, though, weren't much in common use until the Italian Salvino D’Armate (1258 AD) constructed the first eyeglass. Although this claim has since been disputed, there is ample evidence to suggest that eyeglasses were invented in Pisa and soon spread round the world. Vyasaraya (1520 AD), the patron saint of the Vijayanagara Empire wore glasses, apparently gifted to him by the Portuguese. Meanwhile, the Tanjorians were making spectacles out of quartz crystals.

The existence of the first compound microscope capable of magnifying up to nine times, surfaced in the late 16th century through the work of the Dutch father-son duo of Hans and Zacharias Jansen. These makers of fine spectacles worked out an ingenious design, that included not one, but three lenses secured inside a tube fitted with a sliding mechanism that allowed for easy focussing. A few decades later came the real breakthrough, again courtesy a Dutchman, Anton van Leeuwenhoek. The son of a basket-maker, the self-taught Leeuwenhoek spent all his free time tinkering with glass and trying to grind and shape it into spheres. Thus was born a single-lens microscope capable of magnifying objects up to 270 times their original size. This was an unprecedented advance and Leeuwenhoek sensed it instantly. The mesmerising world of microorganisms was no longer an imaginary world. It was the dawn of a new age – the age where one could look within. Biology would never be the same again.

The next advance arrived a few decades later, in 1665, through the work of the polymath Englishman, Robert Hooke, who published Micrographia, perhaps the single most important Western work to match Newton's Principia in its immediate impact. Indeed, Hooke had very nearly stumbled upon the law of gravity that Newton devised decades later, and when he wasn't co-founding the Royal society or developing a grid system for London or deducing the wave theory of light or the law of elasticity, he went busy constructing a microscope, through which he peered wide-eyed into the invisible world, the world of corks and ants and ticks and fleas and snow. What he saw he drew, and what he drew delighted and terrified in equal measure. Hooke had made humans realise their entitlement of earth was shared by millions of living beings that appeared just as complicated and exquisitely designed. He had delivered the greatest lesson the pursuit of science could ever bestow – a lesson in humility. It truly is a tribute to Hooke's contribution that the numerous advancements that followed in the field of microscopy over the next many centuries – like for example those by Carl Zeiss or Otto Schott – only supplemented Hooke's great discoveries, never overshadowed them.

Hooke made science accessible and fun, and anyone who knows how to do this also knows how impossibly difficult it is. One only has to ask Jim.

Jim Who?

You believe what you see, but what you see is written by those who see what they believe. Well, science is a little different from journalism. Seeing truly is believing, and one man who is on a mission to make this possible for millions is Jim, the co-inventor of the Foldscope.