TIL A microscope can simply be reversed to make a telescope. Both telescopes and microscopes were in use in Holland by the end of the sixteenth century
What you can learn today is, that if you use a microscope "the other way around", something big is imaged into somethjng small on the focal plane.
Zeiss, a company that manufactures a shitton of optical stuff, has a very successful semi-conductor branch. That branch started off when some engineers from the microscope-department fiddled around with " inverted" microscopes during their lunchtime to create the first optics for lithography from Zeiss.
I'm a microbiologist and the first thing I thought is this is a person with a homework question asking why you can't flip a microscope to make a telescope. What better way to get the right answer than to confidently proclaim on the Internet bad information as fact? Then I was it's a bot copying content from Reddit and now feel gross.
I'm thinking about going back to school. What did you have to study to get into optical engineering? Is it a branch of mechanical engineering? And what's the daily like in that field?