[The camera was] unusual enough to capture the attention of serious scientists, including the kinds who work for the government, experimenting with nuclear fusion, space travel and spy systems. What grabbed them were photographs Mr. Ross took that allowed them to see with astonishing clarity a tiny footpath on the top of a Colorado mountain seven miles from the camera.

Yesterday and today, Mr. Ross is talking gigapixels, art and the essence of visual comprehension with a dozen scientists, at a meeting at New York University. This summit, closed to the public, was organized by Mr. Ross and his new scientific pals at the government's Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, which specializes in matters pertaining to nuclear weapons and threats to national security.

"We're good at making big computers," said Carl Diegert, lead computational and imaging scientist at Sandia. But, Mr. Diegert said, when scientists look at pictures of the space shuttle, for example, they may not see things as clearly as they might. "We're trying to find how the human emotional part comes into play in finding a crack in the space shuttle. Clifford has figured out how to catch all this information at a moment in time."