Beautiful Science (broadcast Friday, October 31st, 2008)

Diagram of vision and the effect of parallax. From Rene Descartes, Tractatus de homine et de formatione foetus (On Man and the Formation of the Fetus), Amsterdam, 1677. © The Huntington Library

In this segment, we'll chat with the curator of a new exhibition at California's Huntington Library. The exhibition, entitled "Beautiful Science: Ideas that Changed the World," spans centuries of scientific progress, from human anatomy to the heavens, and includes original books and drawings by scientific luminaries such as Galileo, Robert Hooke and Charles Darwin. What masterpieces of science would YOU put in such an exhibition?