Super Vision: A New View of Nature
From the incomprehensibly minute movements of subatomic particles to the equally incomprehensible curve of the universe, Science News associate editor Amato has gathered a selection of images of processes, objects and beings that give the external world's inhuman scales their close-up. From a human immunodeficiency virus rising "like a sun over turbulent waters" over a lymph tissue cell to an Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar image of Washington, D.C., and back down to "the smallest guitar in the world"-a silicon guitar 10-millionths of a meter long, with guitar strings only about 100 atoms wide-Amato tours the limits of representation, and the many techniques scientists and other specialists have developed for rendering the invisible and the monumental. Fractals, microchips, biotechnology and global warming all make appearances. In many cases, the images have been garishly colored in order to highlight the details, sometimes too much so, and the author is obviously interested in comparing art to nature, directly so in a comparison of cancerous dog skin to Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night (plausible) and a cross-section of a dog's skin mole to a Picasso (less so). A series of black-and-white photographs of snowflakes (each one of which is indeed unique) have all the somber documentary power of a Walker Evans. The "Visible Human Project," uses X-rays and magnetic resonance techniques to completely represent the human body, in meaty tissue tones that make the neck look like a piece of chuck. The accompanying text is non-patronizing, introducing technical terms and processes carefully and making this set of visions super indeed.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.