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Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991). [Bouncing balls], ca. 1960. From book: Physical Science Committee, Physics, Boston; D. C. Heath and Company, 1960, cover. Richard and Ronay Menschel Library collection, George Eastman House.

Susan came in to turn on the lights and to encourage us to think about dinner. She drove the three of us to the Greenfield Inn, a stately, many-faceted Victorian building overlooking Moosehead Lake. Berenice was a local personage and we were escorted to a table in a large bay window overlooking the lake. The conversation turned to food, weather, and travels. Berenice described the warmth and richness of café society. The names of people I studied in school slipped casually into the conversation. She said that she never understood what Simone de Beauvoir saw in Jean-Paul Sartre. When I read about these people in school they were never real enough that I could imagine anyone questioning their relationship. After all, they were the gods and goddesses of French culture, not flesh and blood human beings. There, in a dining room looking over a grand Maine lake, I entered Berenice’s world and they became human.

Her words painted the pictures of Paris she never took. Places and people came alive in her precise pithy way of talking about them. As we drove home I thought about the way people’s creative vision affects the way they see the world. It seemed as though Berenice Abbott was always looking through the lens of a camera. It distanced her from the world and at the same time it showed her things no one else could see until they saw it through her eyes.

The following morning I sat in Berenice Abbott’s bedroom while she had breakfast. We talked about physics. Like photography, physics is an approach to looking at and trying to understand the world. The idea of physics is to explain a lot with a little. Newton’s law of gravity explains the path of a ball we throw, the orbits of the planets around the sun, and the orbit of the sun around the center of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. All this and much more from one short equation. After years of training, a physicist can appreciate the beauty of Newton’s equation and its sweeping power. There is a spare elegance to these few symbols on a piece of paper, but it is not a readily accessible beauty. This lack of accessibility nagged at Berenice Abbott and she pioneered the use of photographs to show what physics is without a single equation.

Both Berenice Abbott and I profited from the space race in the 1950s and 1960s. I profited because I was taking high school physics in 1965 and the brand-new, innovative, Physical Science Study Committee text, Physics, contained her crisp photographs. I remember the thrill of seeing those photographs for the first time. They spoke to me even then about connections between physics, geometry, and art. As a child, my father, who was a crystallographer, first showed me the link between geometry and nature. I saw snowflakes under a microscope and marveled at their delicacy and variety all with one universal six-pointed symmetry dictated by the physics of water molecules. We went hunting for quartz crystals in old quarries in New Hampshire. This geometric artistry of nature attracted me to science.

Berenice Abbott showed me the connection between geometry and nature in new ways. When, as a mature scientist, I taught undergraduate physics at Harvard, I used her images. I talked to her about my favorite, a picture of a bouncing ball. The photograph looks to me like a sculpture. The successive images of the ball show how its velocity changes during the bounce, slow at the maximum height and faster and faster as the ball falls to the ground. On each of the three bounces the maximum height decreases as the ball loses energy. It’s all there, captured in one elegant photograph. One law of gravity, one photograph says it all.

Intro | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8