The problem with using waves to detect the physical world is that the quality of your image is limited by the wavelength you use.

Our eyes are attuned to visible light, which has wavelengths in the neighborhood of 0.0000005 meters. That's small enough that we usually don't need to worry about the wavelength-resolution problem since we don't look at things that are 0.0000005 meters wide.

However, the wavelength of visible light is too wide to analyze anything smaller than a cell. To observe things under higher magnification, you must use waves with smaller wavelengths. That's why people turn to scanning electron microscopes when studying sub-microscopic things like viruses. However, even the best scanning electron microscope can only show a fuzzy picture of an atom.