Super Vision: A New View of Nature - Hardcover

Amato, Ivan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810945452 ISBN 13: 9780810945456

Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, 2003

Synopsis

Spanning the world of scientific phenomena from sub-atomic particles to the structure of the universe, a selection of two hundred scientific images draws on an array of modern scientific imaging instruments and techniques to explore the rich beauty and vast complexity of nature. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Ivan Amato is an award-winning freelance science writer and associate editor for Science News. His work has been published in many magazines, including Time, Fortune, U.S. News & World Report, Scientific American, Discover, and Wired, as well as in many newspapers. His books include Stuff, which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book for 1997. Philip Morrison is a physicist who is well known for his numerous books (including Powers of Ten), films, and television specials (the PBS series "The Ring of Truth"). He is currently an emeritus professor of physics at MIT. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

From Publishers Weekly:

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.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0810945452
• ISBN 13: 9780810945456
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 232