HAVE YOU ever whiled away a dull moment on the internet, searching for a clear answer to a scientific question that has been bothering you? If you have, you will be aware of iconic images that crop up again and again, used to illustrate some of the knottiest problems out there. From fractals to fission, DNA to dark matter, understanding the world nowadays comes with pictures attached. In Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science, John Barrow takes full advantage of the visual age in which we live.

“We like pictures,” Barrow observes, “we find them inspiring.” And having seduced us with his selection of arresting images, Barrow capitalises on our attention to explain with admirable clarity what it is we are looking at - or why what we are looking at matters.

Take the Mandelbrot set. If you don't know what it looks like, Google will provide you with thousands of multicoloured versions, each more visually stimulating and conceptually bewildering than the last. By contrast, in the five succinct and wonderfully engaging pages of text that follow his chosen iconic image, Barrow explains the Mandelbrot set's exquisite structure with admirable clarity, and introduces us without any fuss to the marvels of fractal geometry.

A beautiful little line drawing by Sir Isaac Newton in one of his notebooks, showing how he set up a series of prisms in a darkened room to split white light into the colours of the rainbow, is the occasion for a brief biography of Newton himself that neatly sets him in his contemporary cultural context, and then goes on to explain, with diagrams, how water droplets in a shower of rain refract sunlight to create a rainbow.

Barrow stresses that in the making of the images he brings together, art and science have gone hand in hand. This, he suggests, is why those not trained in science can be brought into harmony with scientific ideas via a well-chosen picture. My own favourite among Barrow's iconic images is such an arts-science encounter: a watercolour by the graphic artist Irving Geis of the crystal structure of myoglobin protein, originally created to illustrate a ground-breaking article by the English biochemist and crystallographer John Kendrew in the journal Scientific American in 1961. As Barrow explains, the image took Geis six months to complete, basing it on Kendrew's own three-dimensional model of the molecule.

In spite of the richness and diversity of Barrow's choice of images, there are inevitably gaps. Barrow is a mathematician and cosmologist, and he is obviously most at home with images drawn from fields close to his own heart. There are rather few images from the biological sciences. Perhaps a selection like this might have included the familiar image of a single sperm penetrating the shell of an egg, which sums up our modern understanding of the mechanics of human reproduction.

All that says, though, is that Barrow has found a vivid way to focus our attention on cutting-edge science, and there is an awful lot to learn already from this lusciously produced and captivating book.

Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science by John D Barrow

The Bodley Head, £25; 608pp

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Lisa Jardine's selection

1. 1961 drawing for Scientific American of myoglobin protein, by Irving Geis

2. The Mandelbrot Set

3. Schrödinger's cat paradox, illustrated by Bryce DeWitt and Neill Graham

4. Quantum entanglement made visible, by Kwiat and Reck, 1995

5. Earthrise, taken by Apollo 8 astronaut William A.Anders, 1968

6. Extract from Newton's notebook recording his experiment splitting white light into colours using a prism

7. 1950 portrait photograph of Einstein, by Yousuf Karsh

8. Escher's Möbius Strip II (Red Ants), 1963

9. Robert Hooke's microscopically magnified flea, from his Micrographia, 1665

10. The ozone depletion hole over the South Pole, 2000

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