150 BC – Greek Orrery

An orrery is a mechanical model of the solar system. The left image shows the Antikythera, the oldest known orrery. The middle image shows a virtual reconstruction. The right image shows a contemporary orrery. The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient analog computer designed to predict astronomical positions and eclipses. It was recovered in 1900–01 from the Antikythera wreck, a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. The instrument was designed […]

Added by Melanie Bacou & Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Physical model. Tags: astronomy, greece, physical computation, pragmatic, time

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2002 – Bathsheba Grossman’s Crystal Engravings

Artist Bathsheba Grossman has been 3D printing mathematical surfaces as early as 1997. In 2002 she started to use subsurface laser engraving to produce 3D physical visualizations of data from astronomy, biology, and physics. Left image: a piece of DNA molecule. Right image: a 3D map of our nearby stars. The artist explains to us: This medium excels at imaging less structural data such as disconnected volumes, non-compact point clouds, […]

Added by Pierre Dragicevic and Bathsheba Grossman. Category: Passive physical visualization. Tags: 3d printing, astronomy, biology, digital fabrication, math, physics, science, subsurface laser engraving

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2015 – Solid Model of Stellar Winds

Scientists keep using solid models to help them better understand complex 3D data (here, an astrophysical simulation): They say this provides even more insight into what’s going on. “The ability to hold and inspect the 3-D printed models provides a new perspective on the WWIR’s geometry and an improved sense of the scale of the different structures,” they say. In particular, they say the model allows […]

Added by Pierre Dragicevic, sent by Jean-Daniel Fekete. Category: Physical model. Tags: 3d printing, astronomy, digital fabrication, science, simulation

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	@Misc{physlist,
    	Title                    = {List of Physical Visualizations},
    	Author                   = {Dragicevic, Pierre and Jansen, Yvonne},
    	HowPublished             = {\href{http://www.dataphys.org/list}{www.dataphys.org/list}},
    	Note                     = {Last accessed Feb 2015},
    	Year                     = {2012}
	}

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