via The Art of Science - Slide Show - NYTimes.com.
This link leads to a slide show the NY Times put together to feature some of the finalists in the Art of Science competition held by Princeton University. Although the images are gorgeous to flip through, for me, what truly makes these works art is how so many of them reference patterns that repeat themselves from the microscopic universe all the way up to the scale of galaxies. By looking inward we are also peering outward.
As a photographer, I enjoy that a lot of popular science art is achieved through some type of mechanically aided imaging of microscopic worlds. I think the reason this interests me so is that ever since the advent of the camera it has been used to bring to light things that the human eye alone cannot see. There are so many aspects of our everyday lives that remain invisible to us simply due to the restrictions of our biological optical systems. Photography has provided us with a means to change our perspective. For instance, Eadweard Muybridge's sequence of photographs of a horse running exposed the fact that a horse indeed does, for a moment, have all of its feet off the ground. This fact blew the world away, and made him a little money on a bet! Pretty soon people were arguing of which was the "real" truth, what the human eye saw every day or the new perspective that could only be gleaned through the apparatus of the lens. Today, mostly through scientific imaging, photography continues to reveal new versions of visual truths of our everyday world. And, as much as ever, these images and these truths are art.