The 2014 Chemistry Nobel prize was awarded for the use of spatially controlled fluorescence effects to exceed the diffraction limit in optical microscopy. This is indeed a very clever and worthwhile achievement. It should open a discussion of the wider context of employing a spatially controllable ancillary effect to control the spatial response to an imaging process and thus circumvent the diffraction limit. MRI does just this by using magnetic field gradients to achieve millimeter resolution while imaging with radio waves of meters wavelength. This was the subject of a 2003 Nobel prize (in medicine) and of course was an application of the NMR work which won Bloch and Purcell the Physics Nobel in 1952.
Bob Sciamanda
Physics, Edinboro Univ of PA (Em)
treborsci@verizon.net
www.sciamanda.com