George Shiras, the pioneer of wildlife photography, used flash and photo traps to bring the exotic world of fauna into our living rooms. Here at work on a canoe in 1893. | Photo: George Shiras

“What’s it like to be a bat?”, asked Thomas Nagel, a professor of philosophy at New York University, in an article back in 1974. He wanted to show how impossible it is for us humans to perceive the world like the airborne mammals of the night. But this thought experiment nevertheless invites us to try and imagine hearing the world instead of seeing it. For me personally, I can’t really envision it. I can’t imagine what the world is like for blind people. Not even going to an ‘eat in the dark’ restaurant helped me with that. Nevertheless, I’ve learned from our feature article by Klara Soukup in this issue of Horizons that the visual cortex of the brain can provide us with a sense of spatial orientation even without being fed any visual information. She further explains that our sense of sight functions slowly, but still provides us with more reliable data.

This is why it’s hardly surprising that modern science relies so much on visualisations – ‘Figure 1, Table 2, Model 3’ etc. are all basic elements in specialist articles. Graphics are even made to depict further sensory events such as pain or sounds, as they enable scientists to illustrate different aspects and to compare them in a meaningful way. Countless technologies also provide researchers with the images they need in all kinds of fields today. You can find out more about this in the present issue of Horizons. Sometimes, researchers require help from others to get the images they need – we’ve spoken with three such experts here about their work.

However, visualisations can also convey a false sense of security. Just as the brain uses imperfect sensory impressions to construct its own images of the world, science also bases its theories on incomplete information. When interpreting data, distortions are equally inevitable. And when researchers go public with their data, there is also a risk that they could be interpreted differently from what was intended. That’s just what happened with the three iconic images discussed here.

All the same, such misunderstandings shouldn’t prevent people from continuing to take a long, deep look into the world – whether they’re scientists or not. The Swiss Nobel Laureate in chemistry, Jacques Dubochet, once said of the electron microscope that “it enlarges the world that we construct in our minds”. But the same could be said of so much else today, far beyond the narrow context in which he spoke.