Overview

Scanning electron microscopes have offered great advances in science, but the images that they produce have rarely appeared outside the walls of the laboratory. This text makes the visual intensity of the microworld available to a general audience. In a book that should appeal to non-sc ientists and scientists alike, Dee Breger offers a visually arresting series of photographs that introduce the reader to the hidden world beneath the eye of a scanning electron microscope. Included are almost 200 images which emphasize the elegant symmetry of the most minute forms in nature. From the intricate architecture of invisible Antarctic seashells to the ultramicroscopic crystals formed by the most massive earth movements, here are the rarest glimpses of nature at work. Descriptions are provided for those interested in the stories behind the pictures, many of them prepared by the scientists whose research specimens gave birth to the images. This book takes the reader into the far reaches of time and space: a ten-million-year-old volcanic eruption; a major cosmic impact which hit Earth 800,000 years ago; a fragment of 2000-year-old living wood from the Tasmanian rainforest.

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Journeys in Microspace is a dandy. -- The Review of Arts Literature, Philsophy and the Humanities

It is tautological that we'll never know the unknowable, but it seems we can see the invisible - thanks to the scanning electron microscope (SEM). Magnified hundreds, even thousands, of times, the tiniest particles appear in surprising splendor, while objects and materials we thought we knew - Velcro, nylon - become unrecognizable when reduced to their micro-components. These astonishing, mostly black-and-white images are abstract dramas of light and shade. Textures change with the degree of magnification: The delicate filigreed threads of a goose feather magnified x20 become bamboo stalks at x635. Latex's strength is visibly apparent: Its little fuzzballs seem impenetrable in tightly symmetrical military array; nylon, on the other hand, is a flabby, disorganized tangle of spaghetti-like strings (oh, if only they could make stockings out of latex). The strange landscapes and portraits gathered by SEM expert Breger seem to take one out of this world rather than more deeply into it. But toward the end, Breger brings us back to mundane reality - with a darling close-up of every urban dweller's friend, the cockroach. (Kirkus Reviews)

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