Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image , Felice Frankel , MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2002. $55.00 (328 pp.). ISBN 0-262-06225-9
The mechanics of continuous media—fluids, deformable solids, and fractures—was long considered a natural part of theoretical physics. Well known and widely used were the multivolume courses of theoretical physics by Max Planck, Arnold Sommerfeld, Lev Davidovich Landau and Evgenii Mikhailovich Lifschitz; each of those courses contained one or two volumes on continuum mechanics. Nowadays, continuum mechanics is not extensively taught as a part of fundamental physics. Because continuum mechanics is not just a formal mathematical construction, but a reliable tool in creating models of real phenomena, the best students and young researchers feel that lack in their education and try to compensate for it.
Although deemphasized in formal physics curricula, continuum mechanics is widely taught in mathematics and engineeering departments. Several graphical aids for teaching continuum mechanics have appeared over the past decades. The September 1967 issue of Scientific American has had immense value for teaching continuum mechanics and maintains its value even now. That issue presented, under appropriate magnification, many microphotographs of real materials, such as metals, glasses, polymers, and composites of various kinds. The diverse photographs allowed teachers of continuum mechanics to show their students the “intermediate-asymptotic” character of the continuum approach to materials science. Another example, from fluid mechanics, is Milton Van Dyke’s An Album of Fluid Motion (Parabolic Press, 1982). Van Dyke selected for his album the photographs (again in appropriate scales) of most characteristic fluid-mechanical phenomena, including shock waves, boundary layers, water waves, transition to turbulence, and turbulent currents. Thanks to that album, students could be shown the details of important fluid mechanical phenomena, and I can testify that, during the last two decades, the level of presentation of fluid mechanics became much deeper. Teachers, myself included, have been able to present fluid mechanics as a branch of theoretical physics closely related to experiment. A third example, perhaps unintentional, of a successful teaching aid in continuum mechanics is James Trefil’s Other Worlds: A Collection of Images of the Cosmos from Earth and Space (National Geographic Society, 1999). Nowadays, the basics of continuum physics can be taught on a much higher level than if the teacher were restricted to using chalk and an “acoustic representation.”
However, the subject is changing rapidly. As new phenomena and fields appear, they should be presented to students and the scientific community as efficiently as possible. Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image, by Felice Frankel, explains how scientific photography is performed and how the photographs should be presented at talks and in scientific and popular journals. The author, a photographer and research scientist at MIT, draws on ample experience in scientific photography.
In the wake of this truly remarkable book, the teaching and presentation of scientific results should reach a new and much higher level.
The core of the book (chapters 4–8) systematically presents the art of scientific photography. As with every art, this one cannot be assimilated only by reading a book; additional hands-on training is needed as well. However, after being prepared by this book, a researcher will be able to learn scientific photography rather quickly. The presentation is definitely directed at making microphotographs. After chapter 4, “Basics of Picture Making,” the next three chapters address microphotography: “Photographing Small Things,” “Photographing through a Stereo Microscope,” and “Photographing through a Compound Microscope.” However, the general approach developed in chapters 4–7 can be successfully used for photographing objects in space. I hope the next edition will include a chapter about space photographs. Chapter 8 contains practical recommendations on how to present the pictures to various audiences. The material is interesting, original, sometimes unexpected, and, on the whole, very useful.
Chapter 3, a special discussion by Phylis Morrison, presents the history of documentary, not necessarily scientific, photography. I was pleased to see such old acquaintances as an ionic-microscope photograph of the tip of a tungsten needle that clearly reveals the atoms. I was astonished not to see Harold Edgerton’s now-vintage photograph of the high-velocity impact of a water drop on a solid surface; the crown-like image illustrates loss of symmetry and transition to a periodic structure. It was a historic photograph, and I think the author should include it in the next edition.
It is known that, after a certain crash in his career, Winston Churchill unexpectedly had a lot of spare time, a lot of worries, and an inability to act. By chance he became interested in oil painting, and in the subsequent 50 years, he interspersed oil painting with his diverse and important business. In his book, Painting as a Pastime (republished by Levenger Press, 2002), Churchill strongly recommended painting as a remedy for worry and mental overstrain. After reading Felice Frankel’s book, I have a feeling that scientists may find the envisioning of science a useful pursuit that could diversify their lives and be a reliable remedy for stress. Perhaps a great scientist in the future will write a book, Envisioning Science as a Pastime, and therein acknowledge the author with gratitude.
