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Folks who attended the Seattle World's Fair were able to take
away with them a boxed set of 19 lithographs, entitled
Impressions, commemorating the fair's United States
Science Exhibit. While the imaging technology they employ may look
dated to contemporary viewers, they must have seemed visionary in
1962. The set included the panel, "Van Allen Belts"
(above) reproduced on the "Washingtonia" page of the Fall
2007 issue of WSM.
In his foreword to the set, United
States Commissioner Athelstan Spilhaus wrote, "A science exhibit
for everybody must portray science in many different ways . . . .
It must be satisfying to those who know science, but, more
importantly, it must present science to those not previously
interested in it in a way to intrigue them by relating science to
things they already enjoy and appreciate."
Below is the full text of Spilhaus's
foreword, with links to a gallery of all 19 lithographs. To go
directly to the gallery, click here.
A science exhibit for everybody must portray science in many
different ways because the interests of people are varied and many.
It must be satisfying to those who know science, but, more
importantly, it must present science to those not previously
interested in it in a way to intrigue them by relating science to
things they already enjoy and appreciate.
The scientist is trained to mistrust the raw information of his
senses until analysis and experiment show him their interpretation.
The artist interprets what he sees and feels, uninhibited by strict
physical analysis. Yet from the opposite approach of these two
creative fields there is a merging which emphasizes their common
bases of perception and communication. As the United States science
Exhibit is primarily visual, it is appropriate to explore the
impressions formed by the reaction of the eye of an artist.
Nature's forms are functional. The egg, a perfect enclosure, has a shape
of utter simplicity and beauty borrowed by man in his art and
architecture.
Before there came understanding of the tremendous phenomena of
nature, there was fear, and men invented gods of terrifying
visage to serve until they understood the happenings . . .
gods to the Sun . . .
gods of Storm.
Curious tricks of the eye were appreciated and exploited
by painters for centuries before our recent understanding of how
the eye collects information explains some of these. The artist has
always a choice of opposites in seeing and perceiving—a choice of
background or foreground.
Both science and art delineate creations of the mind invisible
to the eye. Artists portray in religious paintings products of
man's mind stemming from his inner need of a philosophy and
direction in life. Scientists perceive, by extending their vision
with instruments, the nature of our invisible surroundings . . .
patterns of strength and stress . . .
and, with microscopes, see the very fibre of life . . .
and the beautiful natural symmetry of atomic
arrangements.
An artist may depict motion by the suggestion of where the
moving object was; in science, the bow wave of a ship, the shock
wave of a supersonic airplane or the afterglow of an atom when its
particles form a shock wave of light, tell us about
motion.
Is it more than coincidence that what seems to be an
entirely abstract view, such as Lippold's moon, bears close
resemblance to another cosmic happening revealed by
the scientists' emulsions . . .
or that some modern sculpture so closely approaches patterns
revealed by probing electrons?
Science seeks among its disciplines to find common
laws relating apparently widely different happenings, such as
the way a ball bounces and radium decays . . .
and the common wavy nature of many things.
Both scientists and artists can with their widely different
techniques compress or extend time and space.
Delicate machines that emulate nature, as the memory of a
computer does the brain, evolve without conscious effort of the
designer into patterns which also reflect the functional simplicity
of natural patterns.
As science probes the chain of life.
from seed to plant . . .
from plant to maturity . . .
to the very smallest living cells, it reveals
pictures, hitherto invisible, of great beauty.
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