Art and science tend to be very different disciplines. In popular culture, they’re set in opposition to one another: left brain versus right brain, creative versus empirical. But a new book of images shows chemistry at play, illustrating how the disciplines overlap.
The Beauty of Chemistry, by science writer and chemist Philip Ball, with photographs by Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang, reveals the poetic patterns of the chemical processes happening all around us. The images—which show everything from champagne bubbles to gold crystals to rust formed when salt water erodes iron—also act as visual clues to the science at work.