beautiful science

While information accumulation and its visualisation has become a 21st-century obsession, our generation is not the first to discover that a picture is worth a thousand words. I would like to present two scientific examples which document this: a book and an exhibition.

The siblings Uta and Thilo von Debschitz have recently published a unique and fascinating book about the visual world of Fritz Kahn. Fritz Kahn (1888–1968), a physician first by training, was a popular science writer who visualised the structure and function of the human body in a very unique way. Kahn applied his scientific expertise and powerful imagination to create powerful visual metaphors that made sense to those without a technical background. He wasn’t afraid of largely leaving out statistical data analysis to explain how the human body works to a non-scientific audience. Maybe his explanations have become outdated but his strong visual language is still exciting.

The book is carefully curated and filled with images – page after page displays the pioneering work of Kahn’s visual representation of information. His illustratations of systems, cause and effect, and other types of visual stories, enriched with metaphors, can be a source of inspiration for everybody who is interested in the illustrated expression of scientific results.

Here is an appetiser from the world of images in the book. Fritz Kahn illustrated the organs of a man’s body as derived from the gills of our fish ancestors: the arches develop into the lower jaw (I), the auditory ossicles (II), the hyoid bone (III) and the throat cartilage (IV), the bays develop into the ear canal (a), the salivary glands (b), the parathyroid glands (c) and the thymus in the chest (d).

Picture taken from the book "Fritz Kahn" by Uta and Thilo von Debschitz
Picture and caption taken from the book “Fritz Kahn” by Uta and Thilo von Debschitz

More information about the book can be found here.

The British Library in London currently holds an exhibition showing the course of data dissemination across the centuries:  “Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight”. It runs until 26 May 2014.

I haven’t been to the exhibtion but I very much like this display of a beautiful visualisation by William Farr that documents in an innovative way the relationship between temperature and mortality in London from 1840-1850.

William Farr Report on the Mortality of Cholera in England 1848-49, 1852. Image and caption taken from http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/beautiful-science/.
William Farr Report on the Mortality of Cholera in England 1848-49, 1852. Image and caption taken from http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/beautiful-science/.

The Guardian wrote:

“ ‘Beautiful Science’ shows, if we embrace the power of graphics, fresh insights to modern challenges may be glimpsed.”

I couldn’t agree more with this quote!

More information about the exhibition can be found here.

 

 

 

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