Movement for a Socialist Future

This wistful ditty epitomises our persistent thirst to know the real truths of our universe and beyond - to go behind the appearance and find their essence. To do this, we need help from the sciences. However, we can stop wondering somewhat, as we have learnt a great deal since the Renaissance, when optical lenses were invented and fitted in the early telescopes, which were used mostly for observations on land and sea until Galileo Galilei, a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Padua and, also, an instrument maker, constructed a more advanced telescope and directed it to the skies. In March 1610 he published a 24 page pamphlet called The Starry Messenger (Siderius Nuncius) which landed like a bombshell on the learned world. His achievement is best described tersely in his own words, extracted from this pamphlet: “At length, by sparing neither labour nor expense, I succeeded in constructing for myself an instrument so superior that objects seen through it appear magnified nearly a thousand times, and more than thirty times nearer than if viewed by the natural powers of sight alone”.

Snail’s teeth,
Natural History Museum

In the past four hundred years since Galileo, science has provided us with infinitely more sophisticated tools to assist our eyes through which the richest and most varied impressions reach the mind through the brain. There are many other ways of discovering the hidden world other than optical microscopes and telescopes. The entire known panoply of instruments has been used to produce the three hundred stunning images in this magnificent collection, which has been selected by Amanda Renshaw of Phaidon Press, who readily admitted that seeing them changed her understanding of things. No one who sees these images in this book can honestly disagree with her.

David Malin, the astronomer, scientific photographer and technical advisor on Heaven and Earth, said that one of the most important aspects of the book was the sense of scale, from the sub-atomic to the very edge of the universe. Thus we have a picture of protons, neutrons and electrons, the constituent parts of atoms, taken in a bubble chamber and later, astronomical images from deep into space, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, which shows thousands of galaxies in a tiny patch of the sky in the constellation Ursa Major. The most distant objects seen are small blue irregular clouds, which lie close to the edge of the observable universe. The light began its journey in space over 10 billion light years ago, so we see the clouds, as they were when the universe was only about a tenth of its present age.

Sperm at conception, Nilsson/Bonniers

And, to witness an event which occurs every second of each day, but is nevertheless miraculous, turn to page 26, and gaze at the dramatic image of a single human sperm at conception, penetrating an egg cell, at a magnification of 48,000 times! To see an egg travelling expectantly to the entrance of a Fallopian Tube where it will be fertilized by a sperm is a truly beautiful image.

Heaven and Earth is not merely a book of pictures. It is clearly structured with an informative introduction to each chapter and extended captions for the images. The claims made by the Publishers that the book is: “educational and inspirational” and, “a unique guide to the vastness, complexity and beauty of nature” is amply justified.

Heaven & Earth: Unseen by the Naked Eye, Phaidon Press, £29.95 400 pages, 260 colour, 60 b/w photos, www.phaidon.com

This article first appeared in Socialist Future magazine Winter 2002