ON THE SURFACE OF THINGS: Images of the Extraordinary in Science.<i> By Felice Frankel and George M. Whitesides</i> .<i> Chronicle Books: 160 pp., $22.95</i>

The pictures in this visually striking book have two things in common: They are perfectly beautiful, and they are perfectly incomprehensible. Is that series of wonderfully colored strips on Pages 30 and 31 a Rothko? What about those oddly beaded squares on Pages 16 and 17, a Mondrian?

Would you guess that the first is a photograph of optical wave guides (light pipes) magnified to 10 times the diameter of a pinhead or that the second is that of a computer screen likewise magnified? I wouldn’t. In fact, I wouldn’t have known what to make of any of these pictures without the accompanying text. Fortunately there is accompanying text. It is written by Professor George M. Whitesides, the Maillinckrodt professor of chemistry at Harvard University. (The photographs were taken by Felice Frankel, who is now an artist in residence and a research scientist at MIT.) Much of the material photographed in “On the Surface of Things” seems to have come from Whitesides’ laboratory. A brief introduction provides background for the images in this book, but it is a bit strange to hear Whitesides refer to himself in the third person: “In his years of teaching university students he learned, among other lessons, that equations and scientific graphics rivet no one’s attention.”

As I read this I wondered if Whitesides really believed this. Has his attention never been riveted by an equation or a graph? God knows mine was. I have watched a few revolutions in physics unfold in equations and graphs. At those moments you could have heard a pin drop. I will never forget the time when Robert Oppenheimer came to Harvard in the 1950s to give a series of popular lectures. I was sitting behind two of those wonderful Boston ladies with silver-blue hair and white gloves. They very likely had the same names as several of the buildings at Harvard. At one point Oppenheimer said he was going to write down a formula. The ladies looked uneasy. Then he wrote in his elegant handwriting the formula for Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation for position and momentum. I thought the ladies were going to faint. They held each other’s hands for reassurance. The formula meant no more to them than, say, the photograph of crystals magnified 125 times the size of a pinhead, which can be found in this book on Page 66, but it sure packed a wallop.

Perhaps we can draw a lesson from this, the relativity of aesthetics. It is worth keeping in mind that snow-covered mountains, at least to Europeans, were not considered beautiful until the 19th century, when people like John Ruskin changed the way we looked at them. Would the pictures in this book seem “beautiful” to us if our eye had not been educated by modern art? We have learned to see by looking at paintings by Rothko, for example, and if the photograph of a magnified optical wave guide looks beautiful to us, it is very likely because these artists were there first.

There is always a danger in a book like this, the danger of visual saturation. I once listened to a lecture on the images provided by the repaired Hubble Space Telescope. For the first 15 minutes, you couldn’t take your eyes off the pictures. By the end of the hour, root canal surgery would have been less painful. You couldn’t stand it any more. One more photo of a spiral galaxy and you were ready to scream. With a book like this, however, you can go at your own pace. There is no law that requires you to look at all the pictures in one sitting. And of course there is the text, which is a kind of garden salad you can nibble at. You can learn why pearls look white. They are, if you look at them microscopically, made up “of many small transparent particles held in place with transparent ‘glue.’ ” Light enters the pearl and bounces around until it is reflected back out, giving the pearl its white glimmer. You can create the same effect by taking a glass and smashing it into bits with a hammer. “And now, as broken glasses show / A hundred lesser faces. . . .” (Donne)--so does the pearl. Its center is darker than a coal mine.

In “On the Surface of Things,” you can also learn how those ubiquitous liquid crystal displays work. Under the influence of an applied electric field, the molecules line up like bowling pins and let light pass through to be reflected by a black backing. There is a remarkable picture of an LED, magnified 1,000 times greater than the head of a pin. If you didn’t know what it was, you might think it was the Amazon, photographed from a satellite.

Who, then, would like this book? You might, if you have any tolerance for science. And if you have a kid who is beginning to show symptoms (“Why is the sky blue, Mom?”), he or she would be a sure candidate. One of my first recollections of science has to do with a time when my father gave me an astronomy book filled with marvelous and incomprehensible pictures. I fell in love with sunspots. It took many years before I realized that as wonderful as these pictures were, the science is in the equations and graphs.