Cosmic Imagery
by John D. Barrow

About Cosmic Imagery:

We like pictures. They were the first things we ever saw. Our minds were not made for letters, numbers, double-entry book-keeping, musical scores, or mathematical equations – all of these are postscripts to the human story. Our senses evolved in an environment that was appreciated as something to be understood and remembered as a picture.

In Cosmic Imagery, we look at over 200 of the images that have played a key role in shaping our understanding of the Universe. The book is divided into four parts – Space, Earth, Maths, and Physics & Chemistry – and the images in question range from constellations and galaxies to Copernicus; from the first human footprint to the hole in the ozone layer; from Pythagoras’ theorem to the London Underground map; from the first atomic bomb to DNA. Some of those images are so subtle that they dominate our way of doing science or describing reality without us even noticing; others are ubiquitous icons that dominate the presentation of a whole branch of science, or our conception of its history; others still possess an arresting aesthetic quality but have a scientific meaning that makes them central to our story.

Yet this is far from being a ‘picture book’. Every one of the images has a story that is important, unusual or simply untold. Sometimes that story is about its creator, sometimes it is about the scientific insight that flowed from the picture, sometimes it is about the technique of representation itself, sometimes it is because the simple picture was to assume an unexpected importance which stimulated an entirely new way of thinking, and sometimes it is simply a tale of the unexpected.

The motivation for such a book grew partly out of sociological and technical changes within science itself. In just a few years, the presentation of science at all levels, from technical seminars for fellow experts to popular expositions for the general public, has become extremely visual. The ubiquity of  PowerPoint, web-streamed video, digital photography, and artificial computer simulation has meant that images dominate science in a way that would have been technically and financially impossible just 20 years ago. There is a visual culture in science and it is rapidly changing.

In this climate, it is a challenge to think about the role of images in science, not just today, but over many hundred of years. There are definitive photographs, pictures, graphs and charts that play a key role in widening our appreciation of the world and embody our understanding of life and the universe we inhabit. Cosmic Imagery draws together a generous selection of these special pictures. While there are many such images that would figure in almost anyone’s gallery of science, others will be more subjectively chosen because of an importance that is not immediately obvious, or which involves something that has not been recognised at all before.

The future of science will be increasingly dominated by artificial images and simulations. It will be harder for iconic images to last in the face of ever-greater technical facility. So, this is an interesting time to look backwards as well as forwards. I hope that the pictures chosen here will focus attention on the important role they played in facilitating mental pictures and guiding the way science and mathematics developed our understanding of Nature and Nature’s laws.

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