Publisher's Synopsis
Scanning electron microscopes have offered great advances in science, but the images that they produce have rarely appeared outside the walls of the laboratory. This text makes the visual intensity of the microworld available to a general audience. In a book that should appeal to non-sc ientists and scientists alike, Dee Breger offers a visually arresting series of photographs that introduce the reader to the hidden world beneath the eye of a scanning electron microscope.;Included are almost 200 images which emphasize the elegant symmetry of the most minute forms in nature. From the intricate architecture of invisible Antarctic seashells to the ultramicroscopic crystals formed by the most massive earth movements, here are the rarest glimpses of nature at work.;Descriptions are provided for those interested in the stories behind the pictures, many of them prepared by the scientists whose research specimens gave birth to the images. This book takes the reader into the far reaches of time and space: a ten-million-year-old volcanic eruption; a major cosmic impact which hit Earth 800,000 years ago; a fragment of 2000-year-old living wood from the Tasmanian rainforest.
