I came across this image. Quite captivated. At first glance it almost looked like an eye to me. Perhaps I was influenced by a recent visit to the optometrist and my mind wandered in that direction. “Maybe somebody scanned an eye,” I thought. “A coloured scan, perhaps.”
In reality, it’s a visualisation from the STAR detector at Brookhaven National Laboratory showing the tracks of particles produced during high-energy collisions of gold ions. Each coloured line traces the path of a subatomic particle created in the collision. The experiment takes place at Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), where these collisions briefly recreate conditions similar to those that existed moments after the Big Bang. An interesting read on the science behind this.
More than two thousand years ago, Plato imagined the building blocks of nature as simple geometric forms. In a way, modern physics is still exploring the same question. What first looked like an eye is actually the universe looking back at us, revealing its smallest pieces through fleeting traces in detectors.
Sometimes what we see first says as much about the mind as it does about the image…
By the way, have you heard the story of the Blind Men and an Elephant?