COMBINING more than 200 images from the history of science with insightful essays, John Barrow’s Cosmic Imagery reveals the power a picture can have in shaping our understanding of the universe.
Some images are obvious choices, such as Copernicus’s diagram of the solar system, Robert Hooke’s first views of microscopic organisms, Watson and Crick’s sketch of the double-helix structure of DNA and the Hubble Space Telescope’s Deep Field image of mind-bogglingly remote galaxies. There are also many less obvious ones, including Hermann Minkowski’s first space-time diagram, published in 1908, and a 15th-century student’s notebook showing the earliest surviving use…
