Nathan Myhrvold's mother clearly never told him to stop playing with his food. The local photographer and tech maven's newest exhibit—opening at the Tech Museum of Innovation this Wednesday—features levitating hamburgers, bisected lunch pails, and fruit turned inside-out, forcing eaters to reconsider their food through extreme close-ups and unnatural configurations. 

The Photography of Modernist Cuisine: The Exhibitionshowcases more than 75 large-format photographs of food taken by Nathan Myhrvold—former Microsoft chief technology officer and cookbook author—and his Modernist Cuisine team. The photographs turn cooking into a science experiment, where everyday ingredients (like blueberries) are turned inside out and put under a microscope. Some of the results are beautiful, others eerie. 

“I hope that others share with us the child-like wonder and curiosity I feel when looking at these photos,” Myhrvold said in a statement. “The exhibition and book are in many ways a culmination of my lifelong interest in photography, in much the same way that Modernist Cuisine was a milestone in my interest in food.”

As part of the exhibit, visitors can also use microscopes to the see fractal structures and color gradients of Vitamin C crystals, and watch in slo-mo the physics that propel and explode a bursting kernel of popcorn. You'll never look at food the same way again. 

The Tech is the exhibition’s second stop in a three-year worldwide tour. 

Runs June 25 through September 1 at The Tech Museum of Innovation, 201 S. Market St., San Jose