Science and Image in 1998

Biologists such as Nancy Lane are venturing into previously unexplored and strangely beautiful realms of the cell, using sophisticated microscopes allied with familiar, age-old visual techniques.

Nineteenth-century museum sculptures depicting great moments in prehistory might seem kitsch to modern eyes. But, in their time, they were a key way for the latest scientific ideas to be communicated to the public.

The physicist Arthur Worthington was intrigued by the beauty to be found in photographs of splashes produced when bodies of various shapes and sizes fall into fluids. The legacy of his enthusiasm is with us today.

Today we need computers to create images of the complex structures of protein molecules. Irving Geis, nearly 40 years ago, painted a portrait of myoglobin using only his astounding observational skills.

British ‘natural magicians’ of the nineteenth century could turn two flat images into one three-dimensional form. Later, Bela Julesz believed his stereograms showed how the brain turns images from two eyes into one reality.

When a flash of inspiration strikes an inventor or a scientist pondering a theory, they scramble for a scrap of paper on which to capture the thought. When these jottings are drawings they become a form of graphic art.

Nurtured from an early age in the art of still-life painting and naturalistic illustration, the courageous seventeenth-century artist Maria Sibylla Merian allied her vision and her skills to convey the complex life-cycles of insects.

The structure of viruses was for a long time an enigma. It took an amalgam of techniques, especially the rapidly burgeoning field of electron microscopy, to reveal the quasi-symmetrical nature of viral architecture.

Leonardo demonstrated his innovatory drawing techniques in his sketch of a human fetus. The work was partly inspired by his studies of botany and his dissection of a cow — and it hints at his thoughts on the nature of life itself.

You can read much about the history of science and of architecture in the changing styles and materials used in the building of laboratories. It's a story of fashion, functionality and financial constraints.

The size and elaborate staging of the great dioramas, such as Carl Akeley's gorillas, can still impress. Their cost upset museum authorities, but they aided conservation by promoting the idea of wildlife in its natural habitat.

The type of perspective favoured in technical drawing was first used by military draughtsmen to ensure accurate fortifications. It was developed geometrically by Gaspard Monge and drawn to perfection by Johann Hummel.

Herschel the star-gazer with light around his head, Einstein's wild hair and vast brain, Hawking's interstellar mind transcending his earthbound body. It's not just that we've seen them so often: some scientists really look the part.

The now-familiar concept of drawing lines of descent as trees seems harmless enough. But it led Ernst Haeckel (who bent the evidence to prove his Darwinian theories) into believing in the evolution of a Germanic super-race.

What a piece of work is Man! But not in some relentlessly dull anatomy books of the nineteenth century, when ‘style’ was falling out of fashion. Or perhaps Henry Gray thought the wonders of the body spoke for themselves.

Clinicians screening patients for diseases such as breast cancer have to let a machine do much of the seeing for them. Theoretical modelling of the processes involved can help to ensure that reliable images are generated.

Illustrators face a choice of truths: should they draw a creature in studio detail, or in its natural surroundings half hidden by shade? John James Audubon tried to capture the nature of birds in pictures backed by passionate prose.

People who chart the ocean floor draw up landscapes no one has seen, using machines that send out sound waves and invisible rays. Turning sound into shape, their achievement is a map we can see and understand.

How do you bring a flat picture to three-dimensional life? Early photographers met the same visual challenges that confronted Galileo. They used ingenious methods to build relief models of the lunar landscape.

If matter fills the Universe, making everything happen by its interactions, what does it all look like? René Descartes may have been over-mechanistic in his view, but his efforts to visualize the invisible created striking images.