 It is one of the few methods available to quantify cellular structure and components that does not use fluorescence.After its invention in the early 1930s, phase-contrast microscopy proved to be such an advancement in microscopy that its inventor Frits Zernike was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1953.The basic principle to making phase changes visible in phase-contrast microscopy is to separate the illuminating (background) light from the specimen-scattered light (which makes up the foreground details) and to manipulate these differently.