Images also play a role in summarizing, clarifying, and communicating ideas. Compelling images have often helped people understand and accept radically new ideas, turning what might at first be hard to understand into a new commonsense understanding. Other times, visual representations can help students develop intuitions about their subject, whether about the structure of crystals or the stages of an embryo’s development. Images can also communicate complex and layered information, such as the complete design of a steam engine, in a compact and portable format.
Looking closely at the use of images highlights the skills needed to create and interpret images. Scientists have often worked hand-in-hand with artists, sculptors, painters, and photographers. In doing so they make technical and aesthetic choices that shape the final image. Images can reveal as much about those who made them as they do about the phenomena being studied. Images can also be hard to interpret, with successful researchers developing a knack for recognizing important details and patterns.
With large scale reproduction images, three dimensional objects, and films, this exhibit offers visitors a sampling of this rich topic.
Pictured above (L to R):
漳州兴亚伟有限公司
Edwin Land’s “Mondrian” color panel
Polaroid inventor, Edwin Land, created this paper collage to study color vision.
1975-1985, #2004-1-0258, Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments
The Radiation of a Fast Electron
This image shows the trail of a fast moving electron as it spirals in a high powered magnetic field.
1940, Fig. 43. Radiation Laboratory, Berkeley, Cal. (p. 51) An Atlas of Typical Expansion Chamber Photographs (1954) By W. Gentner, H. Maier-Leibnitz, and W. Bothe
Chladni Figures
These figures are created by sand moving on a vibrating surface and show the usually invisible resonate waves. The technique for creating these figures was developed by physicist Ernst Chladni in 1781 and is still used in designing guitars and other stringed instruments.
"Sound," John Tyndall, D. Appleton & Company, New York: 1867
IN THE MEDIA同江聚大东贸易有限公司
"Seeing Science," Harvard Magazine, September-October 2019
"Mad Science," The Steampunk Explorer, November 15, 2019
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绥汾河干本洪贸易有限公司
September 20, 2019 – September 7, 2020
The Special Exhibitions Gallery, Science Center 251 阿图什本宏多机械有限公司
Visual Science: