The title is quite a mouthful, but the content of the book is easier to digest. I’m very proud to announce that my new book is published by The MIT Press on 11 October 2022. Here is a link to their page about the book, and from there you can find the other two titles I have written for them.

Lavishly populated by more than 160 images and immaculately designed by the good people at Quarto here in the UK, ‘Seeing Science’ is my take on why images are so important in the practice of science.

The book is organised into four chapters. The first is an investigation of how scientific instruments (and other technologies) have enabled scientists to realise there is so much more to the world than meets the human eye; chapters two and three investigate how visualising data (from experiments and from simulations respectively) enables us to gain immediate insight into those data, as well as examining some of the ways in which scientists then communicate the information and knowledge those data help to accumulate. Chapter four is a celebration of the importance of art (and creativity more generally) in science.

Below is a brief excerpt from the introduction, and above, a little teaser gallery of a few of the images from the book.

We live among unseen patterns of delicate beauty and exquisite chaos that exist on every scale. We bathe in invisible radiation and particles and we are suffused by shifting fields that permeate all of space. Our very cells are intricate molecular machines, too small to see, and the story of our origins stretches back through an unimaginable length of time. The only way to make any sense of the things that science has discovered is to picture them in our minds—or better still, in front of our eyes.

Seeing Science, Jack Challoner