There was a time when Michael Bailey, an expert in computer graphics development, toed the party line: he told people that a two-dimensional image of an object on a computer screen could convey as much detail and enlightenment as the real thing. But over the past few years he’s become something of a heretic. Now I have to tell those people that I was wrong, he says. It’s embarrassing, but graphics are just not as good as having an object to touch and hold.
Bailey has rediscovered a need that we all, as babies, instinctively recognized. When babies see something new, they immediately want to touch it, hold it, turn it over in their hands, explore its crannies with their tiny fingers. It’s the way they acquire a solid working knowledge of the physical world. Now a growing number of scientists are discovering, along with Bailey, that a picture—even the most sophisticated 3-D computer simulation—just won’t do for their purposes, either. No matter how many hours of processing you pour into an image, it will never be more than an image. It will never gain the solidity of a real object.
Of course, not all objects of scientific scrutiny are suitable for tactile discovery: an individual molecule is too small to be clutched and eyeballed; tectonic plates are too large. But objects large and small can be represented with physical models—and these are Bailey’s new passion. Walk into his office at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and you can’t help noticing them littering his desk and the tops of his file cabinets. Most have the color, heft, and polished softness of carved wood. His collection includes a human heart, fist-size molecules, a three-dimensional representation of a mathematical function of complex numbers, and a strangely flattened jack-o’-lantern.
