John Gribbin— The Universe began. The origin of everything we see about us – stars, planets, galaxies, people – can be traced back to a definite moment in time, 13.8 billion years ago. The ‘ultimate’ question that baffled philosophers, theologians and scientists for millennia has been answered in our lifetime.
Gavin Weightman— Working backwards from the ‘eureka moment’ offers an intriguing perspective: we find the bicycle an inspiration for the aeroplane, a talking automaton suggesting the telephone, early television dependent on discoveries made with a blowpipe and the microchip manufactured with a printing technique that dates from the nineteenth century.
Jenny Diski— The great advantage over real live creatures that my Three Bears had in common with Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse, aside from not needing to be fed or produce droppings, was neoteny. Mickey and my ursine family looked only glancingly like a mouse or brown bears, and much more like babies.
Bernd Brunner— History often rewards great breakthroughs but ignores the preparatory steps that made those achievements possible. The Apollo program, for instance, has been documented in great detail and still receives ample attention, but what of the extraordinary labors that led to that summit? How was flight to the moon
Jennifer Raab — Years ago, standing in front of Frederic Edwin Church’s The Heart of the Andes (1859) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, I wondered, why is this painting so detailed? This was the first word that came to mind when looking at the picture. It was also the
Sarah Gordon– In 1878, photographer Eadweard Muybridge stunned audiences in the United States and abroad when he quickened the shutter of his camera to freeze the motion of a trotting horse. Nine years later, Muybridge’s photographic motion studies culminated in the publication of Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive
This piece at the intersection of Art + Science is a post written by a former Yale University Press intern after she visited the 2012 exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center, The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking. The book that accompanied the exhibition shares its title,
Art conservation offers a fascinating overlap between the worlds of art and science; conservators examine works of art using tools and methods such as microscopy, X-radiography, X-ray fluorescence, and infrared reflectography, and their insight informs decisions about how to preserve, clean, store, transport, and display the works. Here, Ian McClure,
Today we are excited to introduce you to a new series on our our Yale University Press Art & Architecture blog: Art + Science. Posts featured here will occupy that fascinating space where the visual arts overlap with scientific pursuits and discoveries. Today, we are sharing a guest post by Michelle