The Picturing Research workshops
The Picturing Research workshops
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Scientists visualize to explore and understand. Visualization and visual explanations can also enable non-scientists to grasp complex scientific ideas. Pictures amplify the power of storytelling by harnessing the power of the visual cortex. The Picturing Research workshops tapped into the wisdom of the great artists I worked with as a magazine editor, combining simple sketches with brief verbal explanations to explore how words and pictures can interact to communicate complex ideas and results.
The late theoretical physicist Joe Polchinski sketching cosmic strings in a classic blackboard talk.
John Snow's 1854 map of cholera cases in London, an early use of visualization for scientific insight.
About those rhinos
About those rhinos
It's a cautionary tale. Albrecht Dürer never saw a rhinoceros; he based his woodcut on a sketch and anonymous written description. But the vivid detail and artistry of his illustration helped it take hold on the European imagination, such that when the French explorer Leguat drew rhinoceroses from life almost 150 years later, his pictures replicated some of the errors in Dürer's rhinoceros (for starters, an extra horn and a coat of armor never seen in nature). The history of science contains many examples of scientists and the public being misled by inaccurate visual representations.
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