Gerhard Herzberg (1904 – 1999)

This glorious microscopic abstraction is signed “Herzberg and Wills” on the paper mount. It is assumed that Herzberg is Gerhard Herzberg, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1971 for his contributions to the field of atomic and molecular spectroscopy. Wills probably refers to the H.H. Wills Physics Laboratory at the University of Bristol, England, where Herzberg spent a year before returning Germany. The captions are written in English. In 1935 Herzberg and his wife left Germany as refugees and he took up a professorship at the University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon, Canada). From 1945 to 1948 Herzberg was a professor of spectroscopy at the Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago. He returned to Canada in 1948.

This microscopic abstraction seems to eerily foreshadow artwork produced during the “Psychedelic” era or perhaps a scene from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”. It has also been suggested that this crystal resembles a modern Compact Disc (CD). The mosaic structure of the Finlay Colour material only adds to the mystical quality of this image.