Cosmic Imagery

“Dozens of short essays, each prompted by one of science’s visual creations . . . beautiful.”—George Johnson, New York Times Book Review

We live in a visual age—an age of images; iconic, instant, and influential. In this remarkable book, John D. Barrow traces their history in order to tell the story of modern science.

Some images, such as Robert Hooke’s first microscopic views of the natural world or the stunning images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, were made possible by our new technical capabilities. Others, such as the first graph, were breathtakingly simple but perennially useful. Many of these images have shattered our preconceptions about the limits and nature of existence, and together they reveal something of the beauty and truth of the universe, and why, so often, a picture is better than a thousand words.