Close-ups of nano

One of the most interesting things about nanoscience in general is the way that it plays with your perspective on dimension. Things which are mysterious on the level that they are too enormous to fully grasp, versus things that are complex in machinery you can't even see without a microscope. Tiny or large, it reminds you of your own limits in perspective.

So it's really interesting to have that perspective turned around: see close-ups of careful designs that turn out to just be scans of the skeleton of small sea creatures; or artful photographs of things like the machinery of a music box, the parallax reflections of a water drop, colors of bacteria. This is what photographer Felice Frankel does (www.felicefrankel.com). I interviewed her recentlyfor Popular Photography.

Felice Frankel has been called a "photoscience journalist," because what she does is so specific; it's a kind of cross between documentation and art of scientific concepts. As she pointed out in our interview, "Photographs of research itself can often be uninteresting;" her mission is to make pictures of research look beautiful. She got her start with scientist George Whitesides by making a photograph of hydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces look, through careful arranging and composition, look like an array of Chiclets (which ended up on the cover of Science magazine). Later, she collaborated with him on this book, which is out now.

The image I've posted here is an illustration of a nanoskin, which is the surface along a drop of water that keeps and makes it a drop, instead of just water about to fall. The colors you see in the background are a palette of colored squares; if you look closely into the droplet of water, you can see the reflection of this backdrop, on a very small level.

Part of what's so interesting about Frankel's work is that it searches for aesthetics in fact-based regions; it's pictorially investigative, and looking to make a difficult-to-understand medium not just comprehensible, but also lovely. The book is worth picking up also because Whitesides' prose makes complex nano thought easier to understand; it's great, direct prose, that uses metaphors to make the concepts easier to understand. Frankel's photos make it more so. And I love this image particularly because it is a reflection of things that are tiny and large.