5. Creation from the Imagination

I have been exploring some of the great collaborations of science and art and uncovering some very interesting things such as below Its an artists impression of a  rhinoceros, is hadn't been seen in Europe for over 1000 years, so Dürer had to work solely from reports that had come from India  He covered the creature's legs with scales and the body with hard, patterned plates.This was maybe to interpret lost sketches, or even the text, some which state that, '[The rhinoceros] has the colour of a speckled tortoise and it is covered with thick scales'.

So convincing was Dürer's fanciful creation that for the next 300 years European illustrators borrowed from his woodcut, even after they had seen living rhinoceroses without plates and scales.This just shows that the visualisation of the creature was so ingrained in the mind of people as to what it looked like, that even when seeing one with their own eyes the old fantastical sketches remained prevalent. The mental images and associations we have are what we base our options and thoughts on, changing someone's view of something can be very hard after they have formed their own opinions .

Above is another sketch done by a different artist, showing just how the idea spread and took off in the days where artists were some of the few who could give people visual material.

Above is a animation that shows all the galaxies that are floating about in a segment of the universe. Its the largest sky map revealed after first public data release from BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. Led by Berkeley Lab scientists, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's BOSS is bigger than all other spectroscopic surveys combined for measuring the universe's large-scale structure.This animated  was made by Miguel Aragon of Johns Hopkins University with Mark Subbarao of the Adler Planetarium and Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins.
Within it are close to 400,000 galaxies in the animation, with images of the actual galaxies in these positions (or in some cases their near cousins in type). Vast as this slice of the universe seems, its most distant reach is to redshift 0.1, corresponding to roughly 1.3 billion light years from Earth it is only a portion of what is really out there. I find it very inspirational and gives a real visual insight into all thats out there. I also think that for students at highschool or even primary school would find it fascinating and maybe even inspire them to take it up as an interest or hobby. Its thought provoking like this that is missing from the curriculum to capture the imagination and push pupils to explore topics further. With this i started looking into how I could take a concept and visualise it, in the first case i looked to quantum physics such as hydrogen particles, seeing how they were said to behave and how they had been visualised in educational science videos.

Above is one of the videos I looked at that is shown in class rooms, compared to many others it is fairly artisticly done. Some were very simple and condescending for their topics making it very uninteresting to learn  and follow what was going on. I think It could be more visual though, with all the energies going into making films and amazing visual effects, educational resources are really lacking in comparison. 

Im going to aim to have sketches up of some concepts including some on visualising hydrogen atoms to see if I can think of any new or interesting ways to visualise them.