Every November, the “Daza de Valdés” Optics Institute actively participates in Science Week, as do most of the CSIC’s centres and institutes throughout Spain.

In 1947, the first electron microscope in Spain was installed at the Daza de Valdés Institute of Optics (IO) of the CSIC. This instrument became a “frontier instrument”, essential for the development of electron microscopy in Spain.

The activities of the IO in relation to the microscope are analysed, in the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the 1960s. During this time, the Institute of Optics was the institution, not the exclusive one, but the main promoter of the creation of a new epistemic community in Spain dedicated to electron microscopy.

We will explain the actors in this development: who they were, how they were formed and their main motivations.

Lasers are just over sixty years old. In this period of time they have gone from being “a solution in search of a problem” to being fundamental elements in many areas of our lives, to the point of being considered one of the three great inventions of the second half of the 20th century. In this conference we will review with examples what the properties of lasers are and why these have made them such versatile tools as to be used in fields as distant as medicine, astronomy, communications or industrial materials processing.

The gymkhana discovering light is an informative activity whose objective is to show the properties of light and its applications in a fun and interactive way through different workshops held at the CSIC Institute of Optics. In the workshops, concepts such as light refraction and reflection, holography and 3D images, fluorescence and chemiluminescence, the human visual system and telecommunications, among others, are worked on. All workshops are connected to each other by a gymkhana: after each workshop the public must answer a question correctly to move on to the next level (workshop) of the gymkhana. After passing all the levels (and if COVID measures allow it), the public must overcome a laser maze (the activity of the laser maze has yet to be confirmed).