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Seeing Science - Jack Challoner ****

As Jack Challoner reminds us in the introduction to this beguiling book of scientific images, in 1911, the editor of the New York Evening Journal, Arthur Brisbane, advised advertisers 'Use a picture. It's worth a thousand words.' There's no doubt that scientific discoveries can be made more approachable - and sometimes jaw-dropping - with appropriate imagery.

We're used now, for instance, to seeing wonderful imagery from space telescopes. (Oddly, one of the less impressive pictures here is a Hubble image of part of the Andromeda Galaxy, that just looks like a bit of fuzz with bright lights.) But there is so much more that's possible. The first thing that randomly attracted my attention was a false colour scanning electron microscope image of the Covid virus, but every few pages something leaps out that you want to share with other people.

Accompanying these excellent images is a balanced narrative from Challoner. With a book like this there's a temptation to just stick the images in and leave it at that - let them provide those thousand words for themselves. But Challoner gives us interesting observations without ever going into too much depth (occasionally a problem with his in some ways similar book Water). Whether you want to dip in, or read through sequentially, there's plenty to occupy the mind.

You could argue about things that should have been in there, from Hooke's incredible image of a flea in Micrographia (there is something from that book, but it's much less eye-catching), or Anderson's image of the first detected antimatter particle - but any collection will miss some personal favourites. I could also have done without the artists' impressions and occasional artworks - there's so much wonderful science photography out there that we could have stayed with that. But that's a minor issue. It's also significantly too expensive.

Overall this would make a good gift book - or would function well as that much maligned entity, the loo book. It's a visual treat.

Paperback:   


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Review by Brian Clegg: See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a free weekly digest here
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