Welcome to It's Okay To Be Smart.
Today we're gonna look at the Big Picture.
[music] So I've been preparing for a couple big science conferences recently and I've been thinking a lot about the importance of images to communicating science.
Whether it's YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, so many of the ways that we communicate today highlight images over words.
It's not that I think actual words on paper are dying off, in fact those same digital tools are giving science writing something of a rebirth.
But the value of images of images as cultural currency is skyrocketing.
Of course this is nothing new to us in Science Land.
Throughout the history of science photos and illustrations have not only captured key moments IN science, but they've served as first "shots" inw hat Thomas Kuhn would call "scientific revolutions" where paradigms are shifted, theories are realized, new fields of science are born, and minds are generally blown.
In that spirit I've collected a few of what I think are the most important images in science history.
In 1543 all it took to change the world was seven circles.
