Hidden Beauty: Microworlds Revealed

Rating:
Summary: Stunning, Visionary Book!
Review: As a physicist (by profession), and amateur photographer (in my free time) I must say that I have *never* encountered a finer example of a synergy of art and science (not to mention philosophy) displayed than what awaits the lucky reader who purchases this extraordinary book. Some of the images, on a purely aesthetic level, rank (in my humble opinion) with some of the great abstract photographs that have **ever** been taken! Indeed, I am tempted to equate what Dr. Bourely has accomplished here to what Ansel Adams accomplished for the American West with his magnificent large format photography. What Adams represents for the macroscopic world, Dr. Bourely represents for the microscopic one. She is *that* good...as a guide, as a scientist, as photographer, and as a visionary.

Quite simply this is one of the most beautiful books I've ever had the pleasure of owning and I shall treasure it for a long, long time to come. If you love photography, or science, or abstraction, or philosophy, or ever simply marvel at the ineffable mystery we call the universe, you owe it to yourself to get this book. It is destined to be a classic.

Rating:
Summary: Stunning + Inspiring
Review: Talking a tour through this book is every bit as exciting as exploring new realms. Ms. Bourley had carefully considered her career options and among them were astronaut. Then her focus (literally!) took an unexpected turn. She discovered the depths in the ordinary that surround us. Her travels far, far into inner worlds are amazing and truly uplifting. To see the symmetry and beauty of such teensy tiny wholly seperate beings and things is to speak to the wondrous possibilities of the simple (and even inspirational) joys in seeing not totally unfamiliar patterning on such a miniscule scale. I come away thinking "everything is significant.". The calm in that is worth the price of admission. Along the same lines is a movie entitled "Microcosms". I suggest you look for it. You'll like that, too.

Rating:
Summary: Stranger than fiction, and more humbling than...
Review: Wayne and Garth's' experience of meeting the members of Aerosmith.
Strictly black and white pictures of very small things and creatures to be sure, but really a mind-blowingly polychromatic experience of the funky richness of the ineffable order of INTELLIGENCE that IS the universe.
At the scale at which these objects -- always nearby but seldom imagined, let alone seen, to actually look like this -- are presented (breathing holes under caterpillar bellies, a spider's skin, bacterial cell division, sci-fi architecture of metal surfaces, etc), everything comes off as WORLDS, like landscapes on distant planets.
It is humbling and awesome to see Nature in its meticulousness, its precision, its perfection, its detachment in its execution of love and responsibility for all of creation, including those we take to be the least.

Here in these pages, even the most unwelcome fly is transformed from its usual loathsomeness to a sublime thing of grandeur.

But truth be told, as shockingly truth-revealing as this book is, it still won't keep me from swatting the next mosquito that lands on my leg.
Get it and delight yourself and yo kids, present or yet-unborn.