From the Publisher

By Louis A. Weil III

They are sprinkled through TIME every week: clever, colorful charts and diagrams that grab the eye, tantalize the brain and make one want to read the story. This week's issue is no exception. To illuminate the cover stories on particle physics, artist Joe Lertola created a series of arresting graphics that make even so intricate a subject attractive to the reader.

To do so, Lertola, a native of Morristown, N.J., who graduated from Pratt Institute's School of Art and Design in Brooklyn in 1978, has traded in his old technical pens for the zip and click of an electronic mouse and a computer screen. To create or alter an illustration or to add color, he simply taps commands into the keyboards of his sophisticated Macintosh and IBM machines. Says Lertola, a science-fiction buff: "With so many computers, I sometimes feel as if I'm operating a spaceship."

As helpful as they are, however, computers are not creative -- at least not yet. Lertola still does all preliminary doodles with a pencil. What the computer does, he says, is "get artwork ready for printing a lot quicker than two years ago." On paper or on the computer, Lertola has been designing graphics for most sections of TIME since 1983, but his special fascination is with things scientific. He has been called upon to diagram such arcana as Halley's comet and the human immune system.

Few have been as tough to illustrate, however, as this week's cover story on the smallest particles in the universe. Sciences editor Charles Alexander asked Lertola to diagram both the family tree of matter and the difference between types of gigantic underground colliders, the huge machines in which subatomic particles are accelerated to fantastic speeds. "Each assignment has its own challenge," says Lertola. "The image has to get an idea across in a % clever way. This time the devil was in the detail: colors, shapes and contrasts."

Particle physics holds another fascination for him: "It shows that the world is not really the way we see it." As if to illustrate the point, the computer screen on his table suddenly erupts in tiny bursts of colorful sparks without any special prompting. Glancing at it, Lertola, ever the sci-fi fan, says, "I'd like to look 100 years into the future and see how sophisticated equipment will be then."