Cutting-edge science, and its communication to the public, is often brought to life with sophisticated imagery. But how do you go about photographing a distant star formation or the inside of a locust’s brain? Cambridge researchers and technicians...
Our job is to understand the world, to put order into it. I was driven to study icicles because they are beautiful, because of the aesthetics of the evolution of their shape
Professor Raymond E Goldstein
They are Blu-Tacked onto bedroom walls, cover the corridors of every science department in Cambridge and illuminated the University’s most iconic buildings during the light show that ended the 800th anniversary year. But how are these stunning scientific images produced? How much are they manipulated, and what truth – as opposed to beauty – do they contain?
Today, we can ‘see’ the most amazing things. Thanks to telescopes and microscopes, photography and computing power, scientists can visualise the beginnings of human life and the deaths of distant stars – things too small for the naked eye to see and too large for our brains to comprehend easily.
But capturing these images is a complicated business. According to Professor Raymond E Goldstein from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics: “Despite the ubiquity of high-resolution digital cameras, producing these pictures is far from simple. You need to go to great lengths to get it right.”
Fascinated by the stalactite-hung limestone caves near the University of Arizona where he worked until four years ago, Professor Goldstein wondered why stalactites were long and pointy and how these forms could best be explained in mathematical terms. After developing a mathematical theory for the shape, he and his colleagues set about testing their results using photography.
“We took images of the stalactites, digitised the shapes and compared these to the theory. The photographs are stunning, but they are more than just ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ – there is deep science in these images,” he says.
The mathematics of stalactites
Since leaving Arizona for Cambridge, Professor Goldstein’s gaze has shifted from stalactites to icicles: “I looked at icicles, which are long and skinny like stalactites, and wondered if the maths was similar.”
In collaboration with Grae Worster, Professor of Fluid Dynamics at the Institute of Theoretical Geophysics, and Senior Research Fellow Jerome Neufeld, the group produced something resembling a large ice lolly. They watched it melt using a super high-resolution camera, taking pictures every few minutes and using the 500 photographs to measure changes on the icicle’s surface.
“Our job is to understand the world, to put order into it. I was driven to study icicles because they are beautiful, because of the aesthetics of the evolution of their shape. It’s such a simple process that we should be able to find a law to explain it,” he says.
Just as Professor Goldstein finds beauty in ice and the maths behind its melting, Dr Swidbert Ott from the Department of Zoology sees extraordinary beauty in the lentil-sized brains of the locusts he studies, and has gone to great lengths to develop techniques that allow him to image them accurately – and aesthetically.
According to Dr Ott: “A major challenge is to fix the brain tissues so that they are preserved in a life-like state and are able to withstand all the subsequent dyeing and drying without becoming distorted. It’s taken me years of work to perfect the art of getting the specimen into the right condition so that the imaging works.”
Locusts' brains
Using fluorescence-labelled proteins, confocal laser scanning microscopy and software more commonly found in functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of human patients, Dr Ott takes optical sections of the locusts’ brains.
“These virtual slices of brain are digitised and show the fluorescent protein in the brain point by point at very high resolution,” he says.
“You end up with a stack of optical sections through the brain in the computer that you can reassemble and manipulate.”
The results are stunning and, Dr Ott admits, far more aesthetic than the data demand. “You need to produce a dataset, but this paper could have been written without images – with the data captured in double-logarithmic plots – that’s what interests my peers,” he says. “But I think the mathematical analysis becomes more tangible when you look at the images.
“The aesthetics are intrinsic to the structure, so I’ve tried to do justice to that – to get the best data with the fewest artefacts and by doing so I end up with something visually stunning. Representation is important. It’s about representing reality. All good anatomists are perfectionists. You can obsess – like me – about what it looks like more than is strictly necessary. You are after objective truth, and there is a parallel with art in that visual truth and beauty often come together.”
While not essential to his science, Dr Ott believes that producing stunning images is crucial to communicating his science to a wider audience, both to the general public and to academics in other fields. “Close to my heart is getting across the fact that bugs have brains; that they’re not just filled with goo. They are highly structured inside, and I hope my images make people think.”
Some of science’s most iconic images come from telescopes rather than microscopes – pictures of distant nebulae and galaxies whose size is measured not in fractions of a metre but in millions of light years.
Dr Robin Catchpole of the Institute of Astronomy, who has worked with the Hubble Space Telescope, describes how these images are created: “We use a set of filters to isolate different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. We observe a galaxy, for example, at three different wavelengths – red, green and blue. By measuring the amount of energy emitted at each wavelength we can find the temperatures of the stars. And by combining three images we can produce these pretty pictures.”
A question of manipulation
The degree to which images – particularly those for public consumption – are manipulated or enhanced is often debated among scientists but, as Dr Ott points out, scientists could alter their images long before the advent of digital photography and Photoshop.
“The scope for manipulation is enormous. We can all do it. But people forget that scope was there before. When I did my MSc and used the darkroom I could do the same thing – use different filters and paper to alter my images. Scientists and technicians have always had to choose what to show and what not to show.”
For Professor Goldstein, questions of manipulation arise even before his images exist: “Most of the ‘manipulation’ goes on in the process of acquiring the images – playing with light and contrast so that we can detect edges accurately, for example. It’s often the level of contrast that makes an image more striking, so what makes images more accurate for us often makes them more aesthetically pleasing.”
And while the scientific community expects researchers to be scrupulously honest in the images they publish in peer-reviewed research, Dr Robin Catchpole believes the public requires honesty too. This is particularly true for the colours added to astronomical photographs. “What is acceptable manipulation is quite clear in astronomy, and I’d expect it to be observed scrupulously. The filters we use don’t approximate to the human eye, but the colours we assign must have some quantitative value. The image has to reflect some kind of truth, even though it’s not what we would see with the naked eye.”
Without this honesty and accuracy, these images become art rather than science and, Dr Catchpole believes, lose their power to inspire a new generation of astronauts and astronomers: “These images are only valuable and inspiring if you know there is some underlying truth in them. Otherwise we might as well just colour them in by hand,” he says.