Myopic Astronomer's Kaleidoscope

Meet your heroes

Mariana Cook embarked on a unique project: to interview and photograph the world's leading scientists. Tim Radford introduces a selection of her intimate portraits
Gallery: Faces of Science by Mariana Cook

Thursday August 18, 2005
The Guardian

Mariana Cook, 50, works in black and white. She has never taken a picture in colour. Monochrome is her language, she says. Photography is about light: colour is a distraction.

And until her book Faces of Science, she had never photographed scientists. Her usual portrait subjects were artists and writers, and while she won't say anything unkind about artists and writers as a social group, she confesses that she was impressed with scientists. For one thing, they gave her their full attention. For another they almost all - and that includes the 28 Nobel prize winners who agreed to pose for her - answered their own phones. When she asked them questions about their research, they answered, courteously, and in clear language.

"I guess what really struck me - and I don't know how scientists are with one another - but writers and artists expect you to know what they have done and to have read and understood it in an appropriate way. I always make a point of not doing that," she says from her Martha's Vineyard home. "I prefer to rely on my own intuition."

Scientists - and she means scientists like Crick and Watson, the astronomer royal Martin Rees ("He was wonderful!") and the physicist Freeman Dyson, who began his career working on the bomb at Los Alamos, and Alan Guth, the man who worked out how the universe puffed itself from almost nothing to enormity in the first squillionth of a second of time - made no such assumptions. They were perfectly happy to explain what they had done, in ways that made her believe, at least for a moment, that she understood.

"They were really nice to me," she says. "They were courteous and they sat down in front of the camera, and they were all there. They were direct and down to earth and didn't waste any time. They gave themselves."...

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From pottery to plants

Mary Eubanks
Plant biology, evolution of maize. Adjunct professor of Biology, Duke University
Pictured: April 2003, Durham, North Carolina

Who would have ever imagined that my anthropology major would lead to a career in plant genetics? But I was well prepared because, growing up in Mississippi, I got hands-on experience in plant breeding from my grandfather, who developed several new varieties still popular today.

My roundabout path into science was through graduate research in archaeology that focused on maize and pre-Columbian pottery. The maize ears depicted on ceremonial jars were moulded from impressions of real ears, and as such are fossils preserved in clay that permit identification of indigenous races and provide a unique window into evolutionary history.

Scepticism mixed with wonder

Martin Rees
Formation of cosmic structures. Professor of cosmology and astrophysics, University of Cambridge.
Photographed: May 2003, Cambridge

I can't claim to have had any special infatuation with science during my childhood. I was fortunate in my schooling, and gained entry to Cambridge. I realised that I wasn't cut out to be a mathematician, so I tried to find a subject where a more synthetic style of thinking was needed. Astrophysics proved a lucky choice. First, this was a time (the mid-1960s) when the subject was opening up. There was genuine evidence for a Big Bang, and perhaps even for black holes. When a subject is new, it's easier for young people to make a quick mark. Second, I was fortunate to be in the research group led by Dennis Sciama - an inspiring and charismatic scientist, who had attracted a lively research group (Stephen Hawking joined it two years before me).

Over my career, I've worked in many universities in the UK and abroad, but have mainly been based at King's College, Cambridge. One great advantage of Cambridge is that it's so compact. Each college is a community. I've never felt tempted to defect to the US, because no American university has these features. One joy of being here is just walking through King's - especially in the evening, when one hears the echoes of organ music from the lighted chapel.

I've been lucky that astrophysics and cosmology have surged ahead at an exhilarating rate. Although the 1960s were exciting, the rate of discovery has been even greater in recent years. We've discovered that there are planets orbiting hundreds of other stars, we've probed back to the earliest stages of cosmic history, and subjects that were once on the speculative fringe are now part of the mainstream.

Astronomers and cosmologists are now setting Earth in a cosmic context - mapping out the vast universe, and tracing the origin of stars and atoms right back to a so-called Big Bang nearly 14bn years ago. Cosmology used to be a subject where there were hardly any firm facts, and speculation had free rein. But we are now inundated with data. Our work, like that of Darwin, interests a wide public.

Even the simplest-seeming things - single atoms, for instance - are hard to understand. I'm therefore sceptical about any dogmatic claims to know the complete truth. But I'm filled with wonder at the complex cosmos we're part of, and that our brains are somehow attuned to make at least some sense of it......

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· Interviews extracted from Faces of Science by Mariana Cook (WW Norton & Co, October 4, rrp £25). Text and photos © Mariana Cook 2005. To buy for £23 inc free UK postage call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or visit guardian.co.uk/bookshop