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Journal

Essays on the material in our collection, and on a recurring theme it keeps raising: that scientific images are rarely neutral records. They are arguments, and they are frequently doing the reasoning.

Written and checked by the Open Science Museum editorial desk. Every essay lists its sources. Corrections are appended rather than made silently — lumingrade@gmail.com.

• Microscopy · 6 min read

  The book that taught people to believe a drawing

  Micrographia is remembered for coining the word “cell.” Its real achievement was persuading strangers to trust an instrument they had no way of checking — and Hooke was candid that his plates were composites.

• Photography · 7 min read

  Every painter had the horse wrong

  In 1878 a row of cameras beside a Palo Alto track settled a narrow question about a trotting horse, and convicted several centuries of painters of drawing a pose that does not occur.

• Cartography · 8 min read

  A rift nobody wanted to find

  Marie Tharp plotted a valley running down the center of the Atlantic seafloor and was told it was girl talk. It was the first clear outline of plate tectonics.

• Epidemiology · 8 min read

  The most misread map in medicine

  Snow’s cholera map did not discover the pump, it was not his strongest evidence, and the handle came off after the outbreak had already turned. The real story is better.

• Neuroscience · 8 min read

  Drawings that were arguments

  Cajal’s drawings of nerve tissue asserted a gap between cells that no microscope of his era could resolve. He was right, on evidence that did not compel the conclusion.