A Carl Sagan Mosaic January 24, 2010

A Carl Sagan Mosaic

By Guest Contributor
January 24, 2010

Crispian Jago‘s work is absolutely beautiful:

Science is a mosaic. Good science from disparate fields seems to conveniently converge to help us gradually gain a clearer overall view of our universe and make valid predictions based on that knowledge.

No one joined this rich mosaic of scientists together more sublimely and eloquently and passionately communicated this amassed wisdom better than Carl Sagan.

If you read the first few comments, you can find out how to get a larger, 50 MB, poster-size version of this artwork.

(via Science, Reason and Critical Thinking)

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What Are Your Thoughts?leave a comment

  • Wow, that is gorgeous!

  • I was looking for new desktop wallpaper too. That scientist guy is ideal.

  • Reginald Selkirk

    That Einstein photo makes his teeth look crooked.

  • Carlie

    It is nice, if short on female scientists (I only see Marie Curie). Surely Rosalind Franklin could have been in there too? Maybe Barbara McClintock, Martha Chase, Marie Stopes? Those are just the big names that come to mind.

  • ed42

    Look closer folks, IMO this is not constructed well – the pictures are lightened or darkened or colored as needed to construct the picture – with some photos half dark and half light. Also count the repeats, surely there are many more scientists that could have been included.

  • I like the image itself a lot (though I agree with the various criticisms of it, especially the lack of female scientists), but I especially appreciate the sentiment behind it. A really lovely way to think about science.

  • Alan E.

    ed42 I was thinking the same thing. They merely had a picture underneath and adjusted the opacity of the necesary images to make them “fit.” Obvious extra Photoshop work.

  • GribbletheMunchkin

    I’m watching Cosmos on DVD with my science obsessed gf at the moment. Carl Sagan is a true legend, i just wish we could get science programming of that kind of inspirational quality on our boxes today.

  • Claudia

    Well, speaking as a female scientist I don’t really think its a huge deal that there aren’t very many in the mosaic (though Marie Curie IS an absolute must). Many of the pictures are of paintings and its a simple sad fact that due to inequality the list of very notable female scientists in history is simply much much shorter than the list of male ones. We’re working on it 😉

    I like the mosaic, especially the idea of it, but it could be much better. There simply aren’t all that many individuals used in it. Besides the usual changing of color scale to meet the needs of the picture (which I don’t pariticularly object to) if you look at it carefully you’ll see that many frames are repeated very often, sometimes right next to each other. Also, there are different pictures of the same individual (Darwin, Einstein, Dawkins and Newton, on cursory observation), and also a fair number of repetitions of the laeger picture of Sagan.

    Again, love the idea, and goodness knows I couldn’t do this in a million years, but I think I’d add another 50 or so scientists to the mix (Curie, Golgi,

  • At 25 columns by 28 rows that comes to 700 pictures. Unless the artist was working under a million dollar commission, I would challenge anyone to come up with 700 original pictures of different (and gender proportionate) scientists that were originally shaded appropriate to arrange such that they give a good likeness of Carl Sagan. I think he did a good job and I don’t fault him at all for working with a smaller number of images and using Photoshop to shade them to achieve the mosaic.

  • Tony

    Is it just me or does this image look more like Alan Partridge than Carl Sagan?

  • It’s pretty obvious that it was mostly photoshopped. Look at the light streaks in his hair that span multiple pictures, and his eye over Ben Franklin.

    That said, check out where his left shoulder meets his face. It’s a portrait of the final picture. It’s recursive. Haha. Awesome.

  • Ponyslaystation

    IMO this is a pretty amateur job. There are plenty of free software packages out there to do these types of mosaics.
    This one just looks like it has been done with the default settings, no tweaking of the parameters.

    C- Must try harder.