Galleries / The History of Science in Pictures

The browser you are currently using does not support Discover's photo galleries. Supported browsers include recent versions of Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer (version 7 or later), Google Chrome, and Apple Safari.

If you have any questions or feedback, please email webmaster@discovermagazine.com. Thank you for reading Discover, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

Andrew Moseman; published November 24, 2008

IN GREAT DETAIL

THE NORTHERN SKY

FABRIC OF THE BODY

NUMBER TRICKS

MAGNETIC FIELDS

ROUND AND ROUND

INFINITE COMPLEXITY

THE DEATH OF A STAR

EARTH RISE

BIG BANG LEFTOVERS

<p>In the 1660s, Englishman <a href="http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/hooke.html">Robert Hooke</a> built the compound microscope he used to observe and then draw 58 of the 60 pictures in his Micrographia. (His other two drawings feature the moon and the stars.) In his youth, Hooke had apprenticed with an artist, and his art skills allowed him to draw the microscopic world in great detail.</p><p>The details, like those in this flea drawing, stirred up theological arguments over whether these tiny creatures had been designed. The debate inspired a young Charles Darwin to study that idea.</p>

<p>Barrow calls <a href="http://165.112.6.70/hmd/greek/greek_galen.html">Andres Cellarius'</a> 1660 collection of hand-colored engravings "the Sistine Chapel of the map-maker's art." The Dutch-German scientist created this depiction of the constellations of the Northern Hemisphere, with full-color depictions of their Zodiac symbols.</p>

<p>Until Andrea Vesalius came along in the 1500s, knowledge of anatomy came mostly from <a href="http://165.112.6.70/hmd/greek/greek_galen.html">Galen</a>, who wrote in the 2nd century A.D. But where Galen passed down only words--and often grossly inaccurate ones--Vesalius produced a volume of more than 200 woodcuts of human skeletal structure, brain tissue, and more.</p>

<p>The concept is simple: Each number is the sum of the number above it and the number to its left. But Blaise Pascal's 1665 drawing became one of the most influential images in scientific history because it contains more than first meets the eye.</p><p>Pascal's triangle is <a href="http://www.mathsisfun.com/pascals-triangle.html">full of mathematical patterns</a>. Each diagonal row represents an important number set. And highlighting only the odd numbers on this chart creates some <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpinski_triangle">other fascinating images</a>. Though his name is now attached to the picture, Pascal wasn't the first to notice all this--Chinese mathematicians mapped out the chart 600 years earlier.</p>

<p>Using iron filings to help visualize a magnetic field seems ordinary now; you may have even done a similar experiment when you were in school. But in the mid-1800s, Michael Faraday's simple drawings helped jump-start a revolution in physicists' understanding of magnetism.</p><p>Faraday was no mathematician--it took the British physicist <a href="http://www.phy.hr/~dpaar/fizicari/xmaxwell.html">James Clerk Maxwell</a> to outline the working of electricity and magnetism in the abstract. But Faraday's drawings and talks helped laymen achieve a better understanding of these powerful but unseen forces.</p>

<p>Art and science often came together in the works of Dutch artist M.C. Escher, known for his prints and woodcuts of "impossible constructions," such as the famous stairway illusion in <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/Escher%27s_Relativity.jpg">"Relativity."</a></p><p>The ants in this drawing march around a Mobius strip, the one-sided surface discovered in 1858. More than just an illusion, the shape has practical uses, too: a Mobius strip-shaped conveyor belt lasts longer than a normal one because each part of it gets equal wear.</p>

$<p>French mathematician <a href="http://www.math.yale.edu/mandelbrot/">Benoit Mandelbrot</a> lends his name to this image, a geometric space with an infinitely complicated boundary. That is, if you zoom in, it gets more complicated, and if you zoom in again, it gets even more complicated than that, ad infinitum. You can this process <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Mandel_zoom_00_mandelbrot_set.jpg">here</a>.</p><p>Mandelbrot himself had worked at IBM for two decades before setting computer technology to work on the fractal problems that intrigued him. In 1980 he announced the discovery of his "set" to the world.</p>$