Question: Do you things that in the future there is going to be a microscope which allows as to see in colour and magnify over 1000000x times?

Robert Hampson answered on 18 Nov 2014:

There is a major problem with light microscopes in that they can only “see” things that are larger than the wavelength of visible light. Recently a chemist won the Nobel Prize for inventing a technique to avoid this problem in some specific areas. This has allowed us to reach much higher magnifications with light microscopes.

However, to get the best magnification you would still use an electron microscope because electrons have a much smaller wavelenght so you can “see” much smaller things using them. However, you need really thin samples to look at otherwise the electron beam cannot get through the sample. They already have really high magnification with these instruments.

Recently they found ways to map individual molecules using high resolution scanning electron microscopy. It was very cool, you could see chemical structure almost like the chemical drawings you see.