SCIENTIFIC ICONS

Mike makes a really good point. In his reply to The Pencil Marks On The Paper, he states that engineering graphs give a more complete and intuitive understanding than the mathematical characters which produce the graph.

His thought posed the question, are scientific graphs the equilavent of a lingual character?  Or to ask this another way, is a scientific graph what might be called a meta character?  How about proto character?

A scientific or engineering graph is defined as the visual representation of a relationship between two variables.  Generally one is an independent variable, and the other is a dependent variable.  As Mike says, the intersections of these two variables are drawn on an X and Y axes.

The first image that came to me was the sine curve. When we see this, we immediately understand that it is talking about a mathematical understanding.  It is also talking about an oscillating system. A sine curve is an incredibly simple form.  And it can trigger cascading levels of meaning.  So is this icon in some way in-between lingual characters and drawing?

The next image that came to mind is the bell curve.  Again, this immediately implies a culturally accepted definition of a balanced system.  a string of mathematical characters produced this result.  You immediately know that this implies that most of the things that it describes are in the middle and the exceptions are on the fringes.  This might even recall for you a controversial book, titled The Bell Curve.

The point is that each of these two simple drawings contain vast cultural meaning.  They are certainly beyond the meaning implied by a lowly lingual character.  Simple drawings like these move more toward the greater meaning that is contained, for example, in a kanji lingual character.

My drawing above is some sort of attempt to draw in-between lingual characters, in this case kanji, and three dimensional closed forms.

Also, see Scientific Visualization and The Visualization of Science