Suspended in Language, by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Purvis, is the latest cartoon fact volume from Jim's G.T. Labs imprint, a biography of physicist Neils Bohr.
His was the right time: he came of age just as Einstein and Planck were finishing their great discoveries, and so he was poised to take conceptual advantage of them in ways that older scientists like Einstein, Planck, Thomson, and Rutherford were not. His was the first age when theoretical physics became a pursuit separable from experimental physics. And he was gregarious and collaborative in addition to being a brilliant theorist.
The result was that he ranks as the founder of theoretical atomic and nuclear physics and the midwife of quantum mechanics. Virtually every notable physicist of the quantum mechanical revolution either trained at his Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen or visited there on extensive sabbaticals.
This was an extraordinary time in physics, when radical new discoveries came out of laboratories at a rate equaled only by the rate that radical new theories came off of blackboards, as brilliant minds struggled with the philosophical conflicts of these new theories...and with their practical consequences, as Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch's discovery of atomic fission on the eve of World War II changed everything. And Bohr was at the center of it all.
This is easily Jim's most compelling work, though that is in part due to my own background as a physicist. I am not generally a fan of biography, however, so his success in getting me to read it so eagerly can only speak to how good the book is.
The work of Jim's collaborators, primarily Leland Purvis, with guest stars like Jay Hosler and Linda Medley on the apocrypha, is exemplary. Purvis succeeds in clearly conveying both Bohr's life and abstract physical theory, often in the same drawing.
Enthusiastically recommended.
Nice. I might have to get this.