Science and Image

It can be easier to understand mathematical procedures when we can see them in, seemingly, three dimensions. Even though we cannot really see all the dimensions in which these attractors exist, they are satisfying to the eye.

Electricity seemed new and magical, its limits not yetknown: could it really arouse the dead? The Frankenstein storyexpressed an era's trepidation at the prospect of discoveringthe secret of life.

A vision of a dome led to the naming of buckminsterfullerene. This carbon cluster has become an icon for chemistry, thanks to the media-friendly appeal it shares with co-discoverer Sir Harry Kroto.

The nineteenth-century creative genius Sir Charles Wheatstone invented a wave machine and other ‘philosophical toys’ that had a serious purpose in demonstrating the laws of physics.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a diagram can be worth many lines of complicated algebraic formulas. Feynman diagrams are also powerful tools of explanation and prediction.

When X-rays were discovered in the last century they swiftly captured the popular imagination, giving rise to a new art form, saucy poetry and circus sideshows alongside their serious roles in science and medicine.

The invention of the microscope opened up a new world of scientific discovery. It also presented perceptual and philosophical challenges — which were brought into sharp focus by the seminal work of Robert Hooke.

Pictures of far-off planets sent back to Earth by spacecraft allow us all to be armchair explorers. The rendering of these images in a form that we can see involves choices that would be familiar to any traditional landscape painter.

Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table permitted him to systematize crucial chemical data. But its real triumph was as an exercise in theoretical modelling, allowing the prediction of the discovery of previously unknown elements.

The sixteenth-century anatomist Vesalius debunked many of the doctrines of the Greek physician Galen. Vesalius chose his illustrations carefully to act as powerful tools in proving the accuracy of his scientific observations.

Models of molecular structures are not just useful aids in visualization and education for our understanding of the engineering of materials, but also reflect the styles of the dominant modes of design of their period.

Can you tell a criminal from the look of his face? The “downright detestable” appearance of Robert Louis Stevenson's evil Mr Hyde stands in the same tradition as the images used by Darwin in his work on pathognomics.

Copernicus's system of the Universe was revolutionary but his method of representing it on paper was anything but. It was left to Kepler to apply Renaissance techniques of spatial visualization to make the theory come alive.

Over almost 130 years, this journal's appearance has evolved along with changes in design fashions and in the way scientists present their results. The first in a series exploring how science uses visual images.