Even the most committed Beatles fan might fail to spot the classic track in the image above. This is a chunk of a vinyl copy of the Revolver album, specifically part of Paul McCartney鈥檚 Eleanor Rigby, as seen through a Nomarski microscope, which uses differences in the record鈥檚 refractive index to emphasise its surface structure.
Vinyl is a data-storage medium steeped in nostalgia. It remains to be seen whether more recent storage systems, like the IBM Millipede will be remembered as fondly. The vinyl image, and an image of the Millipede, appear in a new book by and .
Whitesides, a professor at Harvard University, is one of the most productive chemists in the world and arguably one of the most inventive. He brings this spirit to the book, an entertaining jaunt through the world of the micro- and nanoscale. The short essays, each dripping with enthusiasm for the topic, are roughly themed around the importance of scientific endeavour on this scale to such areas as medicine, modern computing and the quantum world.
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It鈥檚 not just the text that playfully explores some of the stranger aspects of the invisible world. Frankel鈥檚 photography can be equally creative, most obviously in a photo of a quantum apple with a shadow that appears to belong to a cube.
The pictures are a mix of traditional photography, CGI and images produced using various microscopic techniques, and are dazzling in the best coffee-table tradition. The text is just as vibrant, which makes cover-to-cover reading a slightly exhausting experience 鈥� but worth it when it rewards the reader with such gems as why young children at a party behave like cellular molecules, or how Beethoven had much in common with plants.
No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale
Harvard University Press
- See more of Frankel鈥檚 images on at
