Celebrated physicist and comic book geek James Kakalios was at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday night to give a talk about some of the scientific ideas explored in his two books, The Physics of Superheroes and The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics. Appearing as part of the festival’s ‘Stripped‘ theme – celebrating the world of comic books and graphic storytelling – he explained that, once you get past the physically impossible powers, superhero comics through the years have actually proven to be very good at teaching science accurately.
According to Kakalios, his official job title is “Condensed Matter Experimentalist”, a role in which he’s been researching solid state physics for 25 years (although he’s also recently done work as a consultant in Hollywood). In 2001, however, he also began teaching a freshman class at the University of Minnesota called “Everything I Know About Science I Learned from Reading Comic Books”. During an engaging and very funny presentation, he outlined some examples of comic books getting the science right, including an attempt by the Flash to stop a speeding bullet and Superman’s surprisingly sophisticated knowledge of electrical current. But they don’t always do such a good job, as Kakalios demonstrated with an example from one of Spider-Man’s fights with Electro, where Peter Parker’s misunderstanding of electricity would likely have gotten him killed in the real world! Comic books frequently deal with science because, he said, they’re always envisioning the world of tomorrow; a world where science can either lead to “lasers or death-rays”. His brief overview of the history of comics also revealed that scientists were often the heroes of pulp sci-fi in the ’30s and ’40s, before being superseded (he noted ruefully) by superheroes.
Kakalios’ unconventional use of comic books to teach science has, he said, garnered him far more media attention than the average physics professor, and has even led to his being included in a Trivial Pursuit question. But he is, first and foremost, a physicist, and the final part of his presentation was spent trying to school the audience in basic quantum mechanics. The attempt was a mixed success, but his demonstration of how quantum mechanics led to the develop of CDs and DVDs proved fascinating. Although we don’t fully understand how things work at the quantum level, said Kakalios, the fact is that they do work, and so he favours the “shut up and calculate” interpretation of quantum mechanics. It was, all in all, a truly heroic presentation.
[suffusion-the-author]
[suffusion-the-author display='description']