Computers: Pictures Worth A Million Bytes

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Among the flashy hardware and software on display at last week's First World Supercomputer Exhibition in Santa Clara, Calif., the small Cornell National Supercomputer Facility booth attracted attention out of proportion to its size. There, on a large video screen, more than a thousand stars wheeled around a newly formed black hole, an incredibly dense, bizarre entity with gravity so strong that not even light can escape from it. As nearby stars were sucked in by its gravity, the hole grew. By the time the system stabilized, nearly half its stars were gone. Conventioneers were fascinated.

But not as much as some scientists were. Before their equations were converted into computer images, astrophysicists had predicted that only a tenth as many stars in such a system would be eaten by a black hole. This was no isolated case. Across the nation, in disciplines ranging from geophysics to medicine to entomology, scientists are discovering that computer images can sometimes lead to a better understanding of nature. Borrowing a leaf from Hollywood's special-effects book (and in some cases hiring Hollywood technicians), they are converting their data into video form. Because the human brain is exquisitely adept at picking up visual cues, scientists have begun benefiting from what Robert Langridge of the University of California at San Francisco calls "computer-aided insights." Says Langridge, who uses 3-D graphics to model biological molecules: "Computer graphics gives us a window into what is going on, rather than just a scientific result. It has become an experimental tool."

At the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, mathematicians plot complex equations on a computer-graphics terminal, which translates the numbers and symbols into form and color. Watching a curving, perforated object take form on the screen, the mathematicians gradually become convinced that they have produced a new shape with a jawbreaking name: a complete embedded minimal surface with finite topology. Previously only three such shapes were known to exist; topologists have sought and speculated about a fourth for two centuries, but until this moment it has never been proved to exist. The imagery demonstrates that there are an infinite number of such surfaces.

In West Lafayette, Ind., a Purdue University biologist who until recently was building models of viruses by laboriously fastening together hundreds of brass fittings taps away at a computer keyboard. When he is done, he has created on the screen an image of rhinovirus 14 (one of some 113 varieties responsible for the common cold) that can be turned and viewed in three dimensions. Rhinovirus 14 thus becomes the first animal virus of any kind to have its full portrait drawn.

The growing need for electronic imagery rises from the sheer number- crunching power of computers like those shown in Santa Clara. Says Craig Upson, a graphics specialist who last August left a commercial animation firm to join the staff of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois: "You find yourself lost in this maze of data because suddenly you can compute far more than you can comprehend." The route to comprehension, he says, is to turn the numbers into images.