otoh

You know the old saying, “The qualities in a person or thing that as a whole give pleasure to the senses reside within an idea that is believed to be true or valid without positive knowledge within the discernment of that which can be seen from a certain point by an individual to the exclusion of others.” You may know it better as, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

In the Art of Science Competition “the Princeton University community [was asked] to submit imagery produced in the course of research or incorporating tools and concepts from science.” The results are truly stunning and 55 images are posted in the gallery.

What I found just as fascinating (geek that I am) yet startlingly silly in a way are the text descriptions that accompany the images. They all make perfect sense according to my Nerd-to-English dictionary.

Like these:

This image illustrates evolving dynamical patterns formed during the spreading of a surface-active substance (surfactant) over a thin liquid film on a silicon wafer. After spin-coating of glycerol, small droplets of oleic acid were deposited. The usually slow spreading process was highly accelerated by the surface tension imbalance that triggered a cascade of hydrodynamic instabilities. Such surface-tension driven flow phenomena are believed to be important for the self-cleaning mechanism of the lung as well as pulmonary drug delivery.

An optical micrograph of spun-on polymer-blend film. When a chloroform solution of poly(9-vinylcarbazole) is spun on to a glass substrate, the resulting film has a very rough surface because the chloroform evaporates too fast.

This represents the 16th iteration of the function f(z) = (z*z + r*c)/(z*z – c*c) as a function of c, beginning with z = c (r is a complex constant), in a small region in the complex plane. The hue is determined by the argument of the final value, and the saturation and brightness are determined by its absolute value, decaying to white at the origin and to black at infinity. The white areas thus identify zeroes of the function, while black areas represent its poles.

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