Author: Paul Ratner / Source: Big Think
Science has given humanity an incalculable boost over the recent centuries, changing our lives in ways both awe-inspiring and humbling. Fortunately, photography, a scientific feat in and of itself, has recorded some of the most important events, people and discoveries in science, allowing us unprecedented insight and expanding our view of the world.
Here are some of the most important scientific photos of history:1. Hubble’s “eXtreme Deep Field”
This photo, released on September 25th, 2012, called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, was put together as a combination of 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope’s pictures. All this image does is show us the beginning of the universe. The galaxies revealed by the image date back to about 13.2 billions years ago while the universe is estimated to be 13.7 billion year old.
The Hubble achieved this feat by gathering faint light over an exposure lasting 23 days. This deepest image of the universe ever taken at that time showed us thousands of galaxies, both near and far. More specifically, the patch of space shown by the photo is in the constellation Fornax.
2. Solvay Conference of 1927
One of the most famous gatherings of scientists that still continues to this day, the Solvay Conferences are pre-occupied with tackling the major problems of physics and chemistry. The meeting is produced by the International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry, founded by the Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay in 1912.
Perhaps the most famous such conference was the one that took place in October 1927, when the topic was electrons and photons. That meeting, documented in this photo, was attended by seminal figures in physics and chemistry, including Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Planck, and many more. 17 of the 29 people attending were or became Nobel prize winners following it. The major battle of that conference involved the debate between scientific realists, led by Einstein, and instrumentalists, led by Bohr.
3. Trinity Nuclear Test
Credit: Berlyn Brixner / Los Alamos National Laboratory
The first-ever detonation of a nuclear weapon, code-named “Trinity,” took place at 5:29 a.m. on July 16th, 1945. Giving birth to the atomic age, this was a culmination of efforts by the scientists of the Manhattan Project. The test took place at about 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico at what at that point was the USAAF Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range.
The 22-kiloton explosion involved a plutonium device, nicknamed “The Gadget.” It had the same design as the “Fat Man” – the bomb eventually detonated over Nagasaki on August 9th, 1945.
Interestingly, the name “Trinity”” came from J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory. He was inspired by the poetry of John Donne.
4. Pale Blue Dot
Credit: NASA
This celebrated image was taken by the Voyager 1 space probe at the suggestion of the astronomer Carl Sagan on February 14th, 1990. The probe at that point was 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) away from Earth. Because of that, Earth looks just like a dot or a pixel in the photo, highlighting the astounding vastness of space.
The photograph inspired this beautiful passage by Carl Sagan in his book “Pale Blue Dot”:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us….
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