The most common question about telescopes — how much do they magnify? — is the wrong one. A telescope's real job is to collect light, and the whole history of astronomy is the history of bigger buckets.
The magnification myth
Department-store telescopes advertise '500× magnification!' because that's what beginners think matters. But magnify a faint smudge and you get a bigger faint smudge. The objects astronomers care about aren't too small to see — they're too dim. A galaxy can sprawl wider than the full Moon in your sky and still be invisible, because its light is spread too thin for your eye to register. The problem isn't size. It's starvation.
Aperture is everything
Your dark-adapted pupil opens to about 7 millimeters — that's the bucket you were born with, and every star you've ever seen by eye poured through it. A telescope is simply a wider bucket that funnels its catch into your pupil, or onto a sensor. And buckets grow by area: double the mirror's diameter and you gather four times the light. Hubble's mirror is 2.4 meters across — roughly 100,000 times the collecting area of your eye. Webb's gold-plated segments span 6.5 meters, about six times Hubble's area again. That, not magnification, is why each new telescope sees further back down the well of the sky.
Why bigger also means sharper
Aperture pays a second dividend: resolution. Light is a wave, and waves passing through any opening blur by an amount set by the opening's size — a hard physical limit, not an engineering failure. A wider mirror means a smaller blur, which is how Hubble turned the fuzzy dots of ground-based astronomy into spiral arms and lensed arcs. On the ground, the next generation is under construction now: the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile will stretch 39 meters across, a light bucket the size of an apartment block, aimed at the atmospheres of other worlds.
Faint means far means old
Here's where the bucket meets the time machine: because light takes time to travel, the faintest galaxies are the most distant, and the most distant are the youngest we can ever see. Every extra square meter of mirror reaches deeper into the past. When Webb resolves galaxies from the universe's first few hundred million years, it isn't magnifying harder than Hubble — it's catching photons Hubble was too small, and tuned to the wrong colors, to collect at all.