Technological progress has always brought novel ways of seeing the natural world and thus new ways of mapping it. The telescope was what allowed Galileo to sketch, in his book “The Starry Messenger,” a first map of Jupiter’s largest moons. The invention of the microscope, sometime in the late 16th century, led to Robert Hooke’s famous depiction of a flea, its body armored and spiked, as well as the discovery of the cell, an alien world unto itself. Today the pace of invention and the raw power of technology are shocking: A Nobel Prize was awarded last fall for the creation of a microscope with a resolution so extreme that it seems to defy the physical constraints of light itself. What has made the early 21st century a particularly giddy moment for scientific mapmakers, though, is the precipitous rise of information technology.
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 14:18:28 +0000
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