Felice Frankel Fuels Science with Art

A gel-like structure
Felice Frankel
via The New York Times

Read the full article titled "She Calls It ‘Phenomena.’ Everyone Else Calls It Art." by CORNELIA DEAN in The New York Times of June 12, 2007. The photos alone are worth the look.

The article gives tribute to a scientific illustrator -- one who not only helps the viewer to visualize scientific information, but makes images that are interesting and often beautiful in the process.

For some reason, many people seem to feel that scientific illustration can not be art. Do they feel that the religious art of da Vinci, Michelangelo or Rafael is not art because the artist was painting a subject specified in a commission for the purposes of the commissioner? Do they feel that Durer's Rhino (below) is not art because it was dealing with a subject from natural history? That conceptual, pop and mimimalist art are not art because they appeal primarily to the intellect rather than the emotions? Because they are not (necessarily) pretty. Of course, some scientific illustration is not good art, but then some paintings sold in galleries are not good art either.

I find it interesting that some scientists think in images. The chemist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz is famously supposed to have deduced the ring structure of benzene after visualizing the Ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail. Einstein is supposed to have come understand relativity making mental Gedanken experiments, visualizing what it would be like to ride along a light beam. Other's no doubt think in other ways, but it seems obvious that often "a picture is worth a thousand words".

On the other hand, I was listening to a discussion of brain imaging the other day, and the speaker mentioned that there is research that indicates that pictures make people overestimate what they know. As all lawyer's know, eye witnesses can be quite fallible, not only not observing accurately, but not recognizing the inaccuracies.

So how do you present information so as to both make it intelligible and to convey to the reader/viewer/listener the limitations of the information? I hope that our increasing availability of multimedia, plus the ability to build interactivity into the multimedia will allow us to eventually do a better job!

Albrecht Durer: Rhinoceros