Brainbow

Interesting new science images created by injecting fluorescing protein dyes into mouse brains; the trick is that there are only a few proteins, but they deposit into the cells by type. The scientists are calling this "Brainbow."

The color combines from a few protein "pigments" into a large variety of colors, permitting a new study of neural types, like mixing a full palette from a few primaries.

The way the fluorescing proteins combine in a cell makes new colors which suggest possible biological relationships. The technique has permitted new specificity to be observed, so it will create new information to be researched: in this case, neural cell type, connectivity, and organization.

From an art perspective, this is a good metaphor: the images are especially interesting because they permit our heavily visual minds to rapidly detect commonalities, distinctions, relationships, and transformative properties by color. Which is why the color printing industry is still pretty big.

It's also accidentally good taste. The images are beautiful, because the color relationships are both naturally structured and naturally subtle, and become richer with further viewing - we stare in awe at the night sky: there more you learn, the more you can see, and yet the information steam only deepens - becoming a penetratable but always expanding mystery. When you uncover new levels of specificity - a bunch of new stars - you also get vastly complex new relationships among them: the specific web of space-time that determines their courses.

The same is true, generally, of good art. If you create new specificity, you can potentially new types of aesthetic and cultural relationships. Good work is rich with specificity and only gets richer with further study- a principle true of Brueghel and Pollack and Anselm Kiefer alike. At its best, specificity in art can connect it's subject (what it's about) to highly complex systems of aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical relationships (what it signifies) outside of it's direct subject matter (what it shows.) A great painting is like injecting those fluorescing proteins into a mouse brain, and seeing a complex, structured and specific network previously unknown.

There. I just legitimized abstraction, and at the same time, offered epistemological evidence that science is unlikely to exhaust itself. The more you find, the more you will have to find out.