In 1703, the world's most respected scientific journal published a surprising letter from an unknown author. (At that time, until the twentieth century, anonymity usually meant that the scientist writing was a woman, although the word “scientist” itself was more than a century old, to be coined by a woman.)
The book reported an amazing discovery in the roots of pond plants placed under the microscope, which is still a relative novelty: Attached to the tender aquatic plants were “many beautiful branches, joined by regular oblong and straight figures… the longest side not exceeding 1/2 the width of a hair” – a mysterious beauty, yet it seemed to be more unusual than anyone. “They are more likely to be Tumors than Salt,” speculated the shy scientist, but concluded that “they are too small to judge with the naked eye,” it is impossible to “decide anything for sure.”
These deceptive wonders – small stars and fans and ribbons arranged in perfect radial and lateral symmetries – puzzled Darwin when he encountered them a century and a half later in the dust of the Cape Verde Islands and in the face paint of the indigenous inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. All he did was gasp that “few things are so beautiful,” that they seem to be “created to be examined and admired under a microscope.”
Today, we know that diatoms – thousands of species of unicellular algae, each living Noether's theorem stored in an opal shell – are not created for admiration but for admiration: All life on Earth depends on them. Tiny photosynthesisers that fill all waters, these phytoplankton produce nearly half of our planet's oxygen, the backbone of its biomass, and absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide that dissolves in the oceans.
Knowing about this extraordinary power makes the delicate beauty of the diatom even more beguiling – nowhere more so than this. The Diatom Atlas the German naturalist and teacher Adolf Schmidt (1812-1899), who spent the better part of his life taking cells from all over the world – from Japan to Chile, Java to Barbados – to compose his first picture of these little masters of evolution.
First published in 1874 in black and white, the atlas was reproduced on blue paper – a medium that originated in ancient China, then passed through the Middle East and Spain to Renaissance Italy to be used as a basis for painting and printing, giving two-dimensional art an excellent dimensional quality.
“I died for beauty,” Keats wrote of the requisite melodrama of the Romantics. Diatoms are a wonderful counterpoint to this indifference to beauty, encouraging us to remember that we are here to live beautifully. They could have continued to be producers of chemical energy without the power of a factory, but yet here they are, living gems in the blue world. Permeating beneath their shiny shells and mathematically perfect symmetries is a fundamental question: Why did the world have to be beautiful? And under that still, the eternal answer: No why; just is something.
