Welcome
From the editor.
by Neil Caudle
The notion that science is boring might have something to do with the fact that numbers don’t look good naked. Except for experienced scientists and scholars, people generally have trouble imagining the connection between raw data and the living, breathing world the data describe.
Today, that is changing. In almost every field of science and scholarship, the data are coming alive.
Imagine Charles Darwin exploring the wilds of South America, or venturing ashore into the lava-rock landscape of the Galapagos Islands. Much of the information he gathered was visual. The story of life began to unfold in his mind because he had seen it.
That was the way of science for generations, until advanced mathematics and powerful instruments enabled us to explore the realms we could not see. We had entered a new age of science, but it wasn’t always as sensual or exciting as a sea voyage to unexplored lands, and the data piling up in our labs sometimes overwhelmed our capacity to grasp them. How could we comprehend the patterns of wind through a city, or predict the extent of a flood from a coastal hurricane, or fathom the structure of a protein from numbers alone?
Over the last decade or so, our tools have gotten better. In the right hands, computers can now convert blizzards of data into organized, visual patterns displayed in bright hues on a screen. At last, we can see our way into the data. Often, we can understand them immediately, intuitively. And we can find in those images very real meaning, just as Darwin found meaning in the beak of a finch.
And so we have entered
a new age of science: the age of visualization. It will not be boring. Everywhere we turn, we discover new patterns. The images they form are startling in their complexity, thrilling in their originality. And
very often, they are beautiful, because they have tapped into some of the deepest structures of Nature’s grand design. Science has never looked better.
