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Physicists often talk about the beauty of equations or the elegance of theories. Dawn Meson, a San Francisco-based artist, has harnessed that aesthetic quality in a collection of paintings that depict quantum phenomena. It’s an ambitious undertaking – after all, the things she paints are invisible.

“I’m not actually trying to illustrate the phenomena,” says Meson. “I’m using painting to wrap my head around these complicated ideas.” This painting, entitled Compactification IV, represents the curling up of unseen spatial dimensions, a fundamental aspect of string theory. The complex shapes of these dimensions determine the vibrations of strings, which, so the…