Customer Reviews

Suspended In Language : Niels Bohr's Life, Discoveries, And The Century He Shaped

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Science teachers have a large number of stories - some true, some apocryphal, and some somewhere in between - to regale their students with. We have Einstein's demands of the deity concerning dice, Rutherford's booming voice that trashed lab apparatus, Oppenheimer's Indian verse quoting at Trinity, and Teller's strangelovian life among others, but no good stories from the life of Niels Bohr. Jim Ottaviani, Leland Purvis, et al. have saved us with their intelligent, witty, and spacey cartoon retelling of Niles Bohr's life - Suspended In Language.

If you choose to dip into this very cool science biography, prepare to learn some physics along with the story of Bohr's life. The authors have supplied a generous number of footnotes and endnotes [done as cartoons] to explain the harder points. The book is indexed and referenced to the extreme. This is not some casual cartoon compilation, but a serious piece of graphic scholarship.

I highly recommend Suspended In Language to anyone interested in physics, scientists, or the history of the 20th Century. I also recommend the other books about scientists from G.T. Labs, including Safecracker [Richard Feynman] and Fallout [Oppenheimer, Szilard, and the Bomb].

Ottaviani's Suspended in Language operates on a number of different levels and is appealing with just the right mixture of intellect and humor. While managing to create a biographical text on the life of Niels Bohr the story also delves into the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics. Ottaviani created a piece that could be solely read as a primer on quantum mechanics while managing to focus on Bohr's life. The facts are elucidated in illustrations that are intentionally reminiscent of a comic-strip. Just when you begin to feel like you're cramming a bit too much information into your brain all at once the book will take a several page detour into the every day dealings of Bohr's life, and having given you the chance to collect your wits, rev back up to an intellectual furor. What truly makes the book remarkable though is the concise yet vivid description of the various other physicists that Bohr interacted with and influenced. Ottaviani obviously felt compelled to tell the story of Bohr's life because he impacted so many different areas of science and revolutionized fields whose true merit has yet to be realized. Everyone should read this book in order to have a basic understanding of how the scientific notions that guide our lives today were first conceived of and then put into widespread implementation. It's a great read and an even better learning experience.

To his colleagues, Niels Bohr was the "Pope of Physics." Razor-edged minds like Dirac, Franck, Frisch, Gamow, Klein, Mott, Oppenheimer, Pauli, Planck, Schrödinger, and others -- many of whom would later become Nobel laureates themselves -- to proud to say they had studied with Bohr. He was a poor lecturer because he never knew where his thoughts would take him and would often stop in the middle of an explanation when a new idea occurred to him. Without him, there would be no modern physics, no quantum mechanics, no basic understanding of the atom. And while Bohr sometimes entertained theories that turned out to be wrong -- which he was the first to admit -- even Einstein was wrong in areas where Bohr was right. Ottaviani is a very uneven graphics chronicler of modern science and scientists, but this is a very well thought out book, as successful an attempt as I have seen to explain Bohr's thought (as well as his humane and internationalist personal beliefs) and the basics concepts of quantum physics.

Very funny and insightful; it was great to see the characterization of Neil Bohr and many other important physicists

A little physics background is good in order to properly understand all the jokes.

This is really a good example of tough physics made accessible! I enjoyed reading the book and will definitely recommend it to students and colleagues.

I have read nearly of a Jim Ottaviani's work, and have come to respect him as a lover of science and a devoted disciple of telling the stories of its practitioners. In "Suspended in Language, " he gives us the biography of Neils Bohr, the Danish atomic scientist. I confess that I learned less than I wanted about Bohr or his ideas. Ottaviani's stories are very hard to follow, leaving out a great deal of the explanatory context, or relegating it to wordy appendices. He tends to compensate by becoming extremely wordy, which is death in a graphic medium. Not to mention that Bohr's specialty, quantum mechanics is counterintuitive, whatever means is taken to describe it. If Einstein couldn't get his head around it, the average graphic novel reader won't either.

"Suspended in Language" would maybe make a good introduction to Bohr's life and the backdrop of his times. It might even provide some measure of his value as a theorist. His water droplet analogy of the atom seemed to help scientists envision what was going on inside the atomic during fission. Ottaviani can take credit for this. But his ardor or his subject often outstrips his ability to depict it. That's too bad -- there's a niche to be filled to make science and scientist more accessible to lay people.

Reading the other interview on this book, there's not much I can add since they capture the essence of this book: a physicist on par with his contemporary, Albert Einstein. The major comment I can give is that this is a graphics novel in the tradition of the classic "edu-Manga." But don't let that put you off because it brilliantly captures Bohr's life and philosophy *AND* the history of quantum mechanics in a fairly easy to read package. Given that so many are scientifically illiterate, this is a wonderful introduction to one of the giants of physics and a true shaper of modern society and technology and could even be used as "textbook" in a limited capacity, because it draws you in with the very real human side of the man and the science - rather than the "ivory tower" so often associated with science, mathematics, and engineering today. I even bought a copy to give to an engineering professor / colleague who was looking for Bohr's quote about horseshoes and luck (... "I am told it works even if you don't believe in it."), and even though he isn't a comic book reader, he read the entire book and was absolutely delighted with it. A true gem and one I keep on hand for reference.