Reported byReported by Bill Kelly, STATEWIDE Correspondent
 

[Teacher]"This is a picture by Felice Frankel. She's an artist..."
When a visitor first looks at one of Felice Frankel's photographs, it's not really clear what it is in the picture. That's fine with the photographer.
[Felice Frankel] "The pictures will hold your attention because you don't know what you're looking at. What is this anyway? It's nice to look at, but what is this? The next thing hopefully you do is read the text. And then the next best thing that could happen is then, of course, to ask questions."
[Teacher]"What are those? Those are places where the laser -- yeah, they're really, really small but we can only see them with the microscope."
[Frankel] "And then maybe making connections to what you're seeing in the book to what's around you and having that for the rest of your life. That's all I'm asking for."
Making those connections takes some work because Frankel's photographic work is most often done through a microscope. Felice Frankel has not taken to minimizing what she does with a camera or what she sees in the lens.
[Frankel] "This is literally a history of civilization. You're seeing these unbelievable patterns of bacteria.
The unbelievable images she captures on film have become something of a sensation in the scientific community making interesting, engaging images of complex scientific principles and processes very much in demand."
[Frankel] "It also took me a very long time to light this because, you know, there are contours. This is like almost sand dunes in a way but it was actually quite difficult to light. I have no idea how I did it. I think scientists are trained into thinking that a beautiful picture of their work is unnecessary and gets in the way. I suggest that a wonderful picture of their work is helpful for them to spread the word about their work."
[Doc Edgerton ]"All right. Let him go. Terrific."
It was a Nebraska-born science legend who used photography to show what the human eye could not see. Doc Edgerton made science photography popular and made pop art in the process. Now a science center bears Edgerton's name in his hometown of Aurora.
[Frankel] "Do you think that students could get into this?"
Felice Frankel is visiting, the photographer who now occupies Doc's old office at M.I.T. and now advances his work in science photography.
[Frankel]" I mean we all look at microscopes, but if they were to use -- if they were to use it -- the material to form something beautiful as kind of a gimmick to make them look at it in a way. I'd like to think that I'm helping to clarify, communicating science and at the same time, more important than any of that is making science accessible. That's truly what I'm trying to do."
[Teacher]"Like see this, they shined light through it and it made it all different colors."
[Student]"Those look like fireworks."
How do you visualize magnetism? Like this. Her photo of a tiny, nondescript puddle of something called Ferrofluid.
[Frankel] "Ferrofluid is a strange beast. It's a suspension in oil of very small particles of iron. Under the piece of glass is a yellow post-it and under the post-it are seven circular magnets and so that's creating the pattern that everybody seems to be drawn to. If you look carefully, you can see the window pane where the light was coming from, and then if you really, really look carefully, you see me which I never intended to happen. But it's so reflective that you can see me behind the camera. There's kind of a double lens. Kids like looking for that so that's fun.
Oscillating chemical reactions called the Belousov-Zhabotinsky Reaction, the B-Z Reaction named after the two people who found it, and in the petri dish is chemistry... reactants to chemicals. Every 15 seconds exactly that chemistry oscillates, that is to say it creates another wave of material. They react with each other and it's incredibly regular. Mathematicians are looking at this, because the regularity of it is so remarkable. It's a little disconcerting because you're not quite sure how they could be soap bubbles, but you have to try to imagine this -- it's a little difficult -- but those soap bubbles are growing between two pieces of glass, but they are very much about soap bubbles and bubbles are about turbulence and convection and interference patterns and what happens when films become thinner and thinner so that wavelengths of light when they defract off create all kinds of different colors. There's a lot of science in those pictures. Those are ppers of a blade. The whole machine is actually only about one centimeter square. What's going on in part of M.I.T. microtechnology labs is this whole new nano-technological effort that is smaller and smaller machines and things are being produced. The cover of the book is a detail of what's called a micromachine. It's a motor. That part of a motor is going to be connected to a very small gas turbine engine so things are getting smaller and smaller so that they can be in smaller and smaller places. It turns out in the process I did show something that they didn't want to see and that is there is an irregularity in the smoothness of the blade. Now I happen to think that's beautiful but when I first showed the picture to one of the researchers, they said "Gulp.", we got to work a little more on that part. So I was showing them somewhat of their mistakes which is part of the investigation.
[Kelley]"That has value in and of itself?"
[Frankel]"Errors, goodness, errors are what brings on knowledge, no question about it. That, in fact, is another mistake. That's a mistake made in a laboratory where they were trying to deposit polymer on a surface and they didn't do it well. So what's going on in that picture is that the polymer or film is peeling away forming these cylinders as bark does, you know, as it peels away, it forms these cylinders. They were hoping to document a success, and it didn't work."
[Kelley]"What was their reaction when they saw that image?"
[Frankel] "Well, they hung it up on their wall. "
[Kelley]"They weren't appalled? They were fascinated?"
[Frankel] "Absolutely fascinated. That is the best part of working in a research community. Researchers in science love it all. They are fascinated by mistakes. They prefer successes, but they are curious and they love the fact that they can see it with a different point of view. And that's what I'm doing. I'm introducing to them a different eye and they love it. And I'm delighted."
A different point of view can make even the mundane startling like a favorite photograph she shared with the teachers. Nothing more than a piece of clear Scotch tape.
[Frankel] "You are seeing a story of adhesion or sticking. This is literally the place where the Scotch tape is just about peeling away. You get these fingers of adhesive."
But Felice Frankel is enough of a scientist to see much more than a gee whiz image in a photograph like this. It's information that others can use to understand a world of other truths.
[Frankel] "Sticking at adhesion is also about when cancer cells metastasize, if they metastasize and they go off to different organs and they stick to organs. See what I'm trying to do, aside from all the rest, and probably maybe the most important thing, too, is to let people understand that things are not just about biology or astronomy or chemistry. It's all related."
There's another simple truth in these photos, one that even the most passive viewer can figure out.
[Frankel] "I feel very deeply that science is beautiful, period."

Captioning by Nebraska Captioning Center, Lincoln, Nebraska .