Powered by Imagination: Nanobots at the Science Photo Library

Brigitte Nerlich

Science as Culture Vol. 17, No. 3, September 2008

Nerlich surveys images of nanobots from the Science Photo Library to see what they “tell us about the aesthetic and cultural conventions and metaphors that are employed, and expectations and visions created or engineered, in the process of ‘visualizing’ nanoscience and nanotechnology.” She begins by presenting popular and scholarly definitions of nanobots, mentioning Michael Crichton’s novel Prey for the first of several hundred times. She doesn’t mention Feynman’s debateably significant There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.

Nerlich highlights differing reactions to the term Nanobot among fiction authors and scientists, before posing the question: “can nanobots just be regarded as a kind of rope-ladder that was thrown out to the public by scientists and science popularizers to acquaint it with nanoscience and nanotechnology?” She quotes Hans Vainhinger: “ideational constructs that once become firmly rooted are retained as fictions rather than discarded.” The quote is also helpful when considering Thrift’s discussion of biological metaphors in computing.

end digression.

“representation of something as something else is important. If, for example, scientists were to conceptualize genes ‘as’ tiny miracles maintained by an intelligent designer, rather than ‘as’ codes or blueprints, subsequent discoveries in genetics would be exploited quite differently to the way they are today. Metaphors, such as these, structure attempts to imagine how a given phenomenon (‘nature’ , ‘DNA’ , the ‘brain’ or indeed ‘nano’) is like something else and how it might be treated as something else. Rather than simply mirroring the world, metaphors are invitations for acting upon the world in various ways.

Important to come back and tie this into scenario planning.

I should probably read Lakoff, and finish Visual Cultures of Science.

Nerlich discusses the some of the history of scientific illustration and visualization techniques, including electron microscopy.

Some discussion of Kessler comparing landscape paintings of the American west with images from the Hubble telescope. “The final frontier” / frontier thesis has likely been written about extensively (see Disch’s The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of for one of the more enjoyable), but thinking about looking backward (history of remote sensing, satellite imagery), John Dewey’s The American Intellectual Frontier may be relevant when considering unexplored spaces.

Several pages discussing specific images from the Science Photo Library, followed by an inventory of frequently used terms, visual characteristics, and a brief analysis of usage of the images which doesn’t seem to establish anything outside of interesting correlations.