CRYSTALS ARE THE pinnacle of atomic efficiency, From a tiny seed of highly organized atoms, their structure grows as surrounding molecules repeat a pattern, building atop one another. Photographers Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang built this composite image of a copper sulfate crystal by taking 33 close-ups photographed with a microscope-and layering them atop one another. The image is one of more than 300 in their new collection, The Beauty of Chemistry, which plunges readers into the minute universe of molecules. In it, Zhu and Liang also use infrared thermal imaging and highspeed and time-lapse macro techniques to capture the chemical forms in all their remarkable beauty. In the early 1910s, crystals became our first window into the atomic world. Science writer Philip Ball, the docent for the book's visual tour of chemistry, describes how father and son William and Lawrence Bragg developed a technique called x-ray crystallography. By shining an x-ray beam through a crystal, a process that takes advantage of the ray's short wavelength (about equal to the distance between atomic layers), the Braggs were able to see its inner structure. Later, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin used the same technique to help reveal the double-helix structure of DNA.
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