Back in 1873, the German physicist Ernst Abbe discovered a fundamental limit in the performance of imaging systems such as microscopes or camera lenses. These systems simply cannot resolve features smaller than a critical size determined by the wavelength of light.
For visible light, this resolution limit is about 200 nanometers; anything smaller cannot be resolved. That includes viruses, features inside cells such as microtubules and DNA molecules, even the grooves on a standard Blu-ray DVD disc.
But in recent years, physicists have discovered a way around Abbe’s limit. Whenever light bounces off an object, it diffracts and interferes, causing any fine details to be lost. For visible light, this process takes place in the first few nanometers from the surface.
"The greatest significance of our work is that we present a deduction based on a physical model of the universe dimensionality with a suitable and reasonable scenario of space-time. This is the first time that the number 'three' of the space dimensions arises as the optimization of a physical quantity."