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SURFACE ARTJuly 20, 1998The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Transcript |
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In a rare marriage of art and science, a new photography exhibit uses its images to help explain scientific laws. Two of the project's collaborators discuss some of the exhibit's images.
JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight seeing science. Paul Solman of WGBH-Boston has the story.
A RealAudio version of this segment is available.
NEWSHOUR LINKS:
Browse the NewsHour's coverage of Arts & Entertainment.
OUTSIDE LINKS:
The On The Surface of Things Web site.
PAUL SOLMAN: This summer and into next year a curious combo is touring the country. "On the Surface of Things" is a marriage of art and science. It's a project which not only shows, as its authors put it, images of the extraordinary in science, but actually uses the images to try to explain science, itself.
"On the Surface of Things"
As both a book and exhibition, On the Surface of Things sucks you in with its magnified photographs of surfaces, lurid blow-ups of everything from frost on glass to microelectrodes. But the photographs are being exhibited by major scientific institutions because science is the inspiration here and the reward for your curiosity. Here at last, or at least in school, are answers to embarrassing questions like why does water form drops. So why does it? Well, joining us now to explain this image, among others, are the co-authors of On the Surface of Things. Felice Frankel is a photographer. Her pictures have made the
cover of numerous magazines. And she now directs a National Science Foundation Project at MIT called "Envisioning Science." Harvard's George Whitesides is a chemistry professor Frankel met while on a design fellowship. He led her through the world of science and is the tour guide who will take us through the photographs. And, welcome to you both.
GEORGE WHITESIDES, On the Surface of Things: Thank you.
PAUL SOLMAN: Ms. Frankel, what drew you to this collaboration?
FELICE FRANKEL, Photographer: Do you have four hours?
PAUL SOLMAN: No.
FELICE FRANKEL: I'll tell you quickly that science has always been in my heart, if I could be that heartfelt about it. In fact, in PS92 I wrote that I was going to be a chemist when I grew up.
PAUL SOLMAN: This is a public school in New York.
FELICE FRANKEL: A public school in Brooklyn, New York. I majored in Biology in college and then left science after working in a laboratory and became a photographer. But somehow through various situations I wound up in a wonderful situation to introduce myself to George at Harvard University as an adult. At that point I was 47 years old--as an architectural and landscape photographer--and found this faculty associate, who is obviously very visual in how he expresses himself. And he then introduced me to some of his co-workers in his laboratory, and that's how it all started.
PAUL SOLMAN: So you sort of sidled up to the scientist you always wanted to be or something?
FELICE FRANKEL: Exactly. That's exactly it. And I've come in through the back door in a way, back to science.
PAUL SOLMAN: So, Professor Whitesides, why do you wind up annotating a book of photographs as a Harvard scientist?
Making science interesting to more people.
GEORGE WHITESIDES: Felice had, I think, a wonderful idea in this book, which was that science is interesting and a way to make it interesting to people who are not necessarily technically detailed in their science is to put together a wonderful picture. If they're interested in the wonderful picture, then they might be interested in the explanation for why things work. And I'm here to try to explain why things work.
PAUL SOLMAN: Okay. Great. So let's go back to the picture of the drops of water that we have here. And so, why does water form drops?
GEORGE WHITESIDES: A terrific question. The way to think about the problem is a little bit to anthropomorphize. It's helps a lot, and think about water as a collection of molecules. There are the molecules that are on the outside border, and then there are the molecules of water that are on the inside of the drop. And for some interesting reasons the ones that are on the outside never want to be there. They always want to be on the inside.
PAUL SOLMAN: They're
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