ABSTRACT
Everyone knows that science uses imagery, both verbal and visual, as an essential part of its quest for ever more accurate accounts of material reality. Models, diagrams, photographs, graphs, sketches, metaphors, analogies, and equations (the whole Peircean family of icons or signs by resemblance) are crucial to the life of science. They introduce whole ways of seeing and reading, particularly in dazzling fi gures of thought such as string theory, which seeks an elegant universe, a multiverse of parallel worlds and supple spaces, folding in upon themselves into wormholes, sparticles, and gravitrons. And these images do not remain in the sphere of technical science, but quickly circulate into popular culture, especially cinema and special effects video (as in the PBS Nova series). As an institution, science is quite gifted at presenting itself in mass media, in popular writing as well as visual media. From the paleontologists' reconstructions of extinct life-forms like the dinosaur, to the model of the atom, to the speculative images that circulate across the borders between science and philosophy, science and science fi ction, science and poetry, reality and mathematics, science is riddled with images that make it what it is—a multi-media, verbal-visual discourse that weaves its way between invention and discovery.
