Unseen Beauty

The totally gratuitous beauty of the submicroscopic world is a source of  humbling wonder to me.    Witness these glorious images from the First Art of Science Competition at Princeton University.

Even the words that describe the science of the image are poetic. 

Strange Crystal where beauty describes how mathematics using the "golden mean" can express the seeding of a crystal of a five-fold form rarely seen in nature.

First prize Plasma Table with a dust cloud of silicon micro-spheres

Worm window.  A microscopic nematode looks like the rose window of St. John the Divine.

The Rock Blooms. A slow-moving chemical reaction unfolds in petals.

Mooney Faces. How little information is needed to experience a face.

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny. In the eight weeks after fertilization, a single human embryo traces our entire evolutionary past.

Gouania lupoloides. a cluster of membracid nymphs sucking juice from the plant while ant-attended.