What do you see in the image above? A picture of streaks of lines? An oil painting? Abstract art? It is actually a picture of capillary tubes and in those tubes are solutions of silver nanoparticles. If the solutions are silver then why are there different colors in every tube? Although each of those tubes contain the same substance but the shape and size of the particles varies in each tube which produces the variety of colors shown in the picture.
The artwork was done by Kate Nichols, a young artist/chemist. Her previous work were oil paintings but her passion and curiosity drove her into the field of nanotechnology. Initially she was intrigued by the color of the wings of the morpho butterfly, the iridescent blue. She attempted to recreate the same type of blue using paint but none of her attempts came close to it and it made her wonder why. Through her own research she discovered that the color of the butterfly wings was not due to color pigmentation but because of structural color.
The particle structure on the butterfly wings interrupted the wavelength of visible light as it passes through the particles, this phenomenon produces the unique iridescent blue. This led her to work with nanoparticles as she wonders what are the possibilities of playing with the structure and size of particles. Her curiosity and imagination made her the first artist-in-residence in the Alivisatos Lab, a nanoscience laboratory at UC Berkeley. She has produced many different artworks using nanoparticles and experimented on many different combinations to produce a variety of colors.
Her artwork allows people to, in a way, "see" and "feel" nanoparticles, even though technically we can't see them because they're at a nanoscale. Science is not just about facts, physics, chemistry, test tubes, or to prove a hypothesis. It's much more than that. Kate Nichols is one of the many new breed of artists that combines art with science, she is the bridge between the two fields. I aspire to be like her, although I do not have any artistic talents or a super genius in science, I do wish to be the bridge between the scientific community and the non-scientific community. Below are some of her other artworks.
The world needs both, science and art. Science helps us to understand the mechanics of the world, how nature functions, how matter works, but it is art that adds the soul aspect in science. Art touches the human soul, it reminds us to feel, to experience, to wonder at nature's beauty without a soul we are merely hollow shells following a manual but with no desire.
To read more about Kate Nichols's work, below are the links: