I do nature photography as a hobby, it is something which I really enjoy. I make my living teaching experimental physics. As a photographer I am drawn to close up (i.e. macro) images of the flora and fauna in the Indiana Dunes. By removing the context which is usually associated with common things like a spider web or a leaf, you can see them in a completely different way. Physics can be described as the art of noticing the patterns which exist in the world around us, and then trying to tease out the underlying mathematical relations which describe them. Scaling is a concept that describes how some patterns in nature appear repeatedly, in different phenomena and at vastly different size scales.
On the surface you might not think that there is much overlap between the two disciplines of nature photography and physics. But the more time I spend out on the trails, taking photographs and observing the world around me, the more I see the “physics” in these common everyday things. In particular, the concept of Scaling in physics is becoming ever more apparent in the subjects I choose to photograph out on the trails.
Spider Webs and Galactic Voids
These two images represent two completely different things. The top image is a close up view of a spider web. The bottom image is a scientific representation of how galaxies are distributed throughout the universe. I see a remarkable similarity between these two different phenomena. Both exhibit the same filamentary structure surrounding empty voids. Even more striking is the difference in size scale. In the image of the spider web, the empty voids are a centimeter or so across, whereas the galactic voids are on the scale of hundreds of mega-parsecs across. That works out to a factor of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1 in terms of size difference!
Close up photograph of the filaments of a spider web along the Tolleston Dunes trail in the Indiana Dunes National Park.
A computer simulation of large scale structures called voids and filaments which have been observed to exist at the largest scales in the universe. Each dot in this image represents a single galaxy. Image taken from a paper by Gaite, Jose. (2013). Halo Models of Large Scale Structure and Reliability of Cosmological N-Body Simulations. Galaxies, vol. 1, issue 1, pp. 31-43. 1. 10.3390/galaxies1010031.
Autumn Leaves and Satellite Maps
Another example of the same patterns and structure appearing in very different phenomena at different size scales is illustrated in these next two images. One is a close up photograph of a leaf as it begins to decay and change colors in early Autumn. The second image is a screenshot from a Google Maps satellite view of central Europe. Notice the similarities in how the veins in the leaf connect the dark spots of decay much like how the roads in the satellite image connect cities. Both the veins in the leaves and the roads on the map divide into smaller and smaller segments, dividing up the surrounding areas into finer and finer chunks. This remarkably similar behavior is present on scales of a few centimeters in the one case and over many kilometers in the other.
Close up photograph of an Autumn leaf taken along the Tolleston Dunes trail in the Indiana Dunes National Park.
A screenshot of the network of towns, roads and fields in central Europe taken from Google Maps.
Noticing these connections between such disparate subjects is incredibly rewarding. It also keeps me coming back over and over to these same trails, the more familiar I get with them the more they reveal. Nature Rocks!