On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science

  • Felice Frankel &
  • George M. Whitesides
Chronicle Books: 1997. Pp. 160$35 ((hbk)), $22.95, (pbk)
Ferrofluid - “a gryphon in the world of materials: part liquid, part magnet”.

On reading this book one gets the immediate feeling that one's eyes and mind have truly feasted, that one holds in one's hands an obvious classic at the nexus of art and science. It's the feeling I had when I first read Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, or saw Irving Geis's protein structures, or looked at Peter S. Stevens's Patterns in Nature.

The meeting point here is of photography and surface science, the latter field itself a commons of chemistry, engineering and physics. Felice Frankel is an internationally recognized photographer, whose previous work has been in photographing landscape architecture (also surfaces, also natural and unnatural). George Whitesides is an outstanding chemist, versatile in the extreme, as savvy to the applied as he is to the pure. This modestly priced book contains about 60 photographs by Frankel, and short accompanying texts by Whitesides.

The photographs are startlingly beautiful. In fact, two readers of On the Surface of Things are likely to fall into this dialogue: “Did you see that photo of a ferrofluid, those weird spikes caught between surface tension and magnetism?” “Yes, I did. But what I liked best were the mauve and red-brown rings in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction!” “Really? Did you see that film chaotically peeling off a silicon crystal?”

At the end of the book are little paragraph notes by Frankel on the photographic techniques she used. These are written in an engaging personal style, and, once one discovers them, one is drawn to reading them in tandem with each image.

Frankel's spectacular photographs are the heart of this book, to be sure. But Whitesides also surprises. First, he succeeds (in too small a font, the only design failure of this book) in explaining complex matters of spectroscopy, electronics and the properties of materials without the impediment (to some) and the crutch (to others) of mathematics. Second, he writes of surfaces evocatively, really crafting prose poems around each image.

Art is no more an accident than science. The serious play of the mind, what Immanuel Kant called “the mutual relations of the imagination and the understanding” (and the hand, and the eye), is central to both human enterprises. It is then no surprise that a different way of representing (therefore seeing) an object of scientific investigation — through the artist's sensibility — should be of scientific value. This, just as much as the sheer beauty of the images, is the importance of what Frankel and Whitesides are doing.