02/09/07

Last week a nice lady on Amazon sent me a copy of 'The Cartoon History of Time'.

You've probably never heard of this - unless you happen to be a member of my family. I've certainly never come across anyone else who's heard of it, and I tend to get odd looks if I bring it up in conversation. But it's a very good book and is also, bizarrely, the first comic I ever read. Which may explain rather more than I want to have explained.

It's written by John Gribbin and drawn by Kate Charlesworth (who used to do comic strips for New Scientist), and is in fact a perfectly serious book on quantum physics. ... Well, okay, it does feature Alexis the cat and Junior the boffin chicken, plus Werner Von Heisenberg in a game show, the James Clerk Maxwell Wave-Particle Sheep and various other bits of ridiculousness. But it also includes sentences like 'Quantum uncertainty smears out the moment of creation over a span of 10^-43 seconds' - which you've got to admit is fairly serious as sentences go. It doesn't have much in the way of equations, and has lots in the way of pictures, but there's still stuff in there that I don't really understand. Or rather I understand it beautifully for about ten seconds after closing the book, and then it all falls to pieces again.

I don't think I have the right mind to ever understand quantum physics properly, but I do find it fascinating. So this book is always going to be pretty damn special to me, being my introduction to both Young's Double-Slit Experiment and comics. Take a look if you ever get the chance. Though you probably won't.

Favourite fun physics fact: J.J. Thomson won the Nobel prize in 1906 for proving electrons are particles ... and his son, George Thomson, won it in 1937 for proving electrons are waves. And they were both right.