The Art of Science (And How Oil Kills)

Nick Bax's optical trap, a wound up laser beam able to hold microscopic particles stable in three dimensions.

Every year Princeton University holds its Art of Science awards, and MSNBC's Science and Technology department has posted some of the award-winning images, most if not all of which are pretty damn wondrous. The above image, Bax's laser beam, is in actuality a failure of what he was trying to do. He was attempting to get the beam to appear as round and cylindrical as possible, but what he wound up with was this gunmetal gray embossed, ripple-effected cardiod surrounded by molecular-life-looking silica beads. Failure has never looked so beautiful, so hopeful. 

A spherical object submerged in viscous silicon oil and the striated flow patterns caused by this; Princeton's Shelley Chan, Josue Sznitman and Alexander Smits.
This might be one of the more splendidly disturbing--and timely, given what's going on in the southeast--images. Silicon oil is 5,000 times more viscid than water, and though that may result in some stunning patternistic imagery here (think of extremely tiny interlayers of chromospheric gas) but one can't help but be reminded and think immediately of the oil spill off the Gulf. You can visually see here, in a kind of clarity and depth not often seen, just how thick this stuff is by looking at the flow pattern and the miniscule layers formed after something as small and tiny as a sphere puts a tincture in, not even it's middle, but just the oil's surface. Imagine, for instance, a brown pelican submerged in this; or rather, imagine your own head plunged beneath this surface (which might be an arguably just comeuppance for a few of these promulgators of oil). Stepping down now from the moral soapbox, aesthetically, I love the gradation moving from yellow to red to blue, three of my favorite colors especially when thrown together. 

For my favorite out of the sixteen award winners, though, it's a toss amongst the two pictures above and this last dazzling muralesque color-emulsion right below, which almost manages to look like some recently-unearthed drippy Fauvist piece or maybe even an early print of Picasso's. There's even small shades of a certain Dutchman's Starry Night in there, or just his skies in general. A total, sheer pleasure, this one right here.

Magnetic reconnection converts magnetic energy into particle energy, with the magnetic field being confined to the small red islands and the high energy particles as yellow sperm-like squiggles swimming around the blobs. It's astrophysics stuff, but it looks almost identical to biological structures and the same bursts of energy found there. Princeton's Lorenzo Sironi and Anatoly Spitkovsky.

Check out the rest of the images here; they're all pretty arresting.