A few months ago Jim Ottaviani visited Austin during the promotional tour of his graphic novel,
Feynman, a biographical sketch of famed physicist Richard Feynman. It turns out that Jim's day job is in the field of digital libraries, and he had a sort of informal chat at the library, where it turned out he knew two of my colleagues from graduate school.
Its a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it.*
A few things:
1) I struggled mightily in high school physics and stuck with geology as much as possible in college when asked to to take science (rocks!). My investigations into modern physics (stuff they were not teaching at my high school) have been mostly catch-as-catch can through television specials, reading articles online and this, my third comic book on physics in any way, shape or form. I know some basic principles, I know some names, I understand that light behaves like a wave and a particle, and aside from that, I sort of stop and start with what everyone who has ever owned more than one Pink Floyd album knows about Schroedinger's Cat. And, as I understand it, what we consider the point of the experiment is incorrect.
2) I don't pretend like I had ever heard of Richard Feynman before this book hit the shelves. The pop-culture aspect of science also eludes me, and so I had not read any of Mr. Feynman's books or sat about urbanely quoting the man over coffee served in a small and delicate cup.
3) I have a hard time remembering the basic fundamentals of physics. Every time I return to the material, that part of my brain re-engages, and neurons re-fire, but its not something I think about very often. Its sort of how I wrote down what the Higgs-Boson is just so I had a place to go look it up every time I needed to know while reading an article on the LHC.
My hat if off to Jim Ottaviani for his handling and structure of a book that could have been an horrendous mess. The book is really 85% biography, 15% physics lesson in order to explain why Feynman matters to Sally Q. Reader. As he states in the afterword, I had no doubt that Ottaviani had done his research enough to both understand and not judge the man particularly one way or another, and to internalize what Feynman was on about enough to share it with an audience as clueless about physics as myself.
