WRI 191/192: Seeing Is Believing

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Emily's Library Research tips and tricks for "Seeing is Believing" 

Thea Goldring , Writing Seminar Instructor 

The Hubble Space Telescope captured the “Pillars of Creation” by translating invisible spectra into brilliant colors, bringing into focus a nebula 6,500 light-years beyond our sun. PET scans peer into the brain, using radioactive tracers to map the neurological origins of human emotions, cognition, and dreams. How else do geologists and biologists, paintbrushes and algorithms render the invisible, the fleeting, the unknown and never-before-seen? How do the limitations of human sight influence what science can envision, and how can human imagination, in turn, extend the limits of what can be seen and believed? We begin this Writing Seminar in the University’s special collections as students examine groundbreaking illustrations of the previously hidden realms made visible by the invention of the microscope. We turn next to 19th-century paintings of the lost world of dinosaurs, as students dig into early attempts to reconstruct prehistoric fauna and flora. For the final paper, students identify and investigate an attempt to render the unseeable. Possible topics range from the subatomic to the interstellar, from the deep past to the distant future, including CERN’s artistic residency program, speculative views across the landscape of Proxima Centauri b, exhibits of Paleolithic humans at the American Museum of Natural History, and cover art for the cyperpunk novel Neuromancer.