Category Archives: Non-Fiction

Book Review: The Manga Guide to Physics

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Having read and enjoyed nearly all of the entries in the Manga Guide series by Ohmsha/No Starch Press, I’ve been going back to read those ones I missed the first time around. The Manga Guide to Physics is pretty much what it sounds like, covering what most people think of when they hear the word physics: mechanics, which is the physics of motion, force, and energy. Other areas of physics, like electricity, thermodynamics, and quantum mechanics, are left to future titles.

The book covers its material in four chapters: Law of Action and Reaction, Force and Motion, Momentum, and Energy. The subject matter is explained via a series of private tutoring sessions between the two main characters, high school students Megumi and Ryota. In the prologue, Megumi, an all-star athlete, has a bad day, losing a tennis match to her arch-rival while she is distracted by thoughts of her poor test performance in physics class. She enlists Ryota, the star science student of the school, to get her back on track academically. It may even turn out that a better understanding of physics could improve her game.

The storyline is simple but good, and the tennis angle provides a good vehicle for illustrating and applying physical concepts. Many people think physics is just a series of formulae, but a mathematical formula is just one way of expressing the behaviour of, and relationships between, objects in the physical world. Visual and graphical representations are also very effective ways of conveying concepts in physics, and The Manga Guide to Physics expertly applies these approaches.

Although the author, Professor Nitta of Tokyo Gakugei University, does not shy away from the relevant equations, even including some (completely optional) calculus-based sections, this book’s focus is firmly centred on conceptual understanding rather than calculation. Typical of this series, the main ideas are introduced via the story, which is illustrated in graphic novel form, while deeper explanations are left to a few pages of text at the end of each chapter. However, while some of the other books in the series include end of chapter practice questions (Manga Guides to Calculus, Molecular Biology, and Statistics, for example), the text-heavy pages in Physics are reserved for derivations and more complicated calculations.

This book does an excellent job of explaining these concepts, however, and showing where the equations come from, even if it doesn’t provide the reader with practice using those equations. Unusually, Nitta starts out with forces, specifically, Newton’s Third Law, discussing details of motion (velocity, acceleration, displacement) later. This approach works well, because it allows the first chapter to be qualitative, rather than jumping straight into the math.

He only touches briefly on force diagrams, but gets the main idea of action-reaction pairs across via thought experiments and Socratic questioning. The use of both equations and different types of motion graphs in the next chapter are explained well through examples in the main body, and would be well-paired with a more traditional textbook’s practice questions. Momentum and energy are also well done, explained first qualitatively, then with numbers.

The Manga Guide to Physics has the potential to be a great resource for the independently-minded student, and its non-traditional topic sequence is an effective alternative to the usual way of doing things. The series’ book on calculus also takes an uncommon, but much superior approach to its topic that I found most helpful in refreshing my memory, and this alternative approach to the physics may also be just the ticket for some students. Sound pedagogy, a fun story, and the natural pairing of a visual medium with a visual topic make for another home run from this consistently strong series.

(No Starch Press, 2009)

Reprinted with permission from The Sleeping Hedgehog
Copyright (2011) The Sleeping Hedgehog

Book Review: Feynman

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And now for something completely different. I was intrigued and delighted when I stumbled across this rather quirky project from First Second Books the other day. It’s a fresh new biography of the famous Feynman: bongo-playing, girl-chasing, and Nobel-winning; physics god of generations of undergrads, as much for his barroom stories as for the ubiquitous diagrams that bear his name.

This isn’t the first Feynman bio, and it likely won’t be the last. James Gleick’s Genius set the gold standard, cutting through legend upon legend – Feynman picking locks in Los Alamos; Feynman spending a summer sabbatical learning molecular biology and immediately making a discovery about DNA; Feynman the Nobelist rubbing elbows with royalty and flubbing the etiquette – and getting at the real character-forming events in-between.

More recently, physicist and author Lawrence Kraus, feeling there was too little said about Richard Feynman’s significant work in fundamental physics, focused on tracing the development of the scientist’s major professional work in The Quantum Man. Before his death, the enormously popular Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think? collected many of Feynman’s essays, lectures, and well-practiced anecdotes (as told to his friend Ralph Leighton); a few of these greatest hits plus many new ones were later published post-humously in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. And there are many, many more.

As far as I know, however, Ottaviani and Myrick’s simply-titled new book is the very first one to chronicle the man’s life graphically. And it’s gorgeous. Just look at the brilliant cover.

The clean illustrative style seems a perfect fit for Feynman’s light-hearted approach to life, while still being detailed enough to convey subtle facial expressions and body language. Throughout, the man on the page is recognizably, uniquely Feynman, the graphical and textual elements complement each other so beautifully it is like watching the man on video.

But credit also must be given to Ottaviani for weaving scores of otherwise unrelated stories into a portrait of a truly original life. The major source materials for this book are the famous Surely You’re Joking and its follow-up, but these are self-contained recollections, lectures, and musings. Drawing out and tying together the biographical bits and pieces of these much longer stories, and capturing the flavour of each one while quoting only a tiny bit of it requires an inspired touch. Making full use of the visual medium, Ottaviani and Myrick manage to give us all the punchlines in a fraction of the space, meanwhile creating a sense of continuity that is absent in the original, non-chronological story collections on which they draw.

I really like this book. It fills a gap in the Feynman corpus that I didn’t realize was there. It’s not that we need a briefer or more readable version of Feynman and Leighton’s eminently successful books. With Feynman we have something wholly new, a different perspective and focus make this a worthwhile read even for those of us who’ve heard these stories before. Librarians with librarian degrees may want to look into adding this title to their collections. That the first edition of what is essentially a graphic novel is in a beautiful hard cover form was another unexpected bonus to me, as this item has a place of honour on my shelf.

(First Second, 2011)

Article first published as Graphic Novel Review: Feynman by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick on Blogcritics.

Book Review: The Manga Guide to the Universe

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The Manga Guide series began modestly with a single title near the end of 2008, The Manga Guide to Statistics, and it was a surprise hit. Now here we are on book eight of the series, with book nine just around the corner. We’ve had Manga Guides to Databases, Calculus, and Molecular Biology. It seems there is no scientific topic that can’t be improved by adorable comic illustrations. Now we see if that even applies to the universe itself.

The premise is quite brilliant. Japanese high school students Yamane and Kanna are the only members of their struggling drama club. They’ve committed to putting on a show at an upcoming arts festival to justify their existence, but are at a loss as to what they will do. Just then, an American exchange student, Gloria, walks in, eager to join the club and displaying a deep enthusiasm for Japanese culture. The three of them put their heads together and settle on doing an adaptation of “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter”, wherein a tiny girl is discovered inside a stalk of bamboo, only later to be discovered a princess of the moon.

There’s only one problem, this tenth-century tale needs some updating, today’s post-Apollo program audience won’t buy the idea of a kingdom on the moon. Yamane needs to update the story with a more distant, mysterious location. But knowing little about the heavens, more research is needed. Fortunately, Kanna’s brother is an astronomy major at the university, and his favourite professor is more than willing to share the wonders of the universe with an interested audience. But just how far will they need to go to find a home for their princess?

An introductory astronomy course or textbook normally surveys such a wide array of different disciplines and reasoning techniques that most of them can be covered only qualitatively. The hodge-podge nature of the topic thus provides a less obvious intellectual progression than something like molecular biology, calculus, or chemistry, wherein each new topic builds on a previous one. Ishikawa’s chosen narrative arc is both historical and natural to new students of astronomy, first focusing on the skies as seen from the Earth (especially our own moon), then expanding to the rest of the Solar System, our Milky Way Galaxy, other galaxies, and then the overall shape, history, and future of the universe as a whole. The final chapter discusses a number of open problems in astronomy, including the theory of other universes, and the mysteries of dark matter and energy.

Although I wasn’t expecting to learn about Japanese literature in this book, it was really a nice fit, and in retrospect, it’s quite natural to discuss how cultural views of celestial objects and the universe as a whole have changed over time. Ishikawa also ties the birth of new universes back to the original story in the final chapter in a brilliant and very satisfying way.

Throughout the book, we get a good view of why astronomers believed the universe was a particular way, as well as why they were proven wrong, from discarding the Earth-centered model, to recognizing the vastly greater distances of the stars compared to the relatively nearby objects of our Solar System. The text engages the reader with leading questions and logical implications, and the data and thought experiments are well served by the visual illustrations. Ishikawa uses both some classic analogies and some fresh, unique ones to get some difficult concepts across.

I was delighted that he also took time to cover some hot-button topics that a traditional textbook may have left out: Kanna discovers a UFO and by the end of a chapter, she has learned enough astronomy basics to figure out what it really was and why it seemed to be following her; the possibility of life either in our Solar System or elsewhere in the galaxy is discussed, including the specific details of our best nearby candidates, and the more general statistical argument made famous by Frank Drake.

The Manga Guide to the Universe is a perfect blend of lucidly argued basics and unfettered, cutting-edge possibility. One of the best yet in the series (which is saying a lot).

(No Starch Press, 2011)

Article first published as Manga Review: The Manga Guide to the Universe by Kenji Ishikawa on Blogcritics.

Science Fiction to the Rescue in WWII

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I reviewed the new Heinlein biography recently, which I quite enjoyed. It’s the first of a planned two-volume project, so I am also eagerly anticipating the second, particularly since by the end of part one, only Heinlein’s first couple of books had been mentioned (along with a few notable shorts).

This volume was surprisingly interesting given that the majority of it covered Heinlein’s life prior to his full-time writing career. After all, the reason anyone would want to read a bio of a famous author is because they’re interested in his work, but it turns out he was also an interesting man before he became an interesting author. Of course, he also lived in interesting times, and having now read several histories and biographies taking place in the first half of the twentieth century, I find I just can’t get enough of it. So much happened in the century of my birth.

One rather surprising tidbit came after the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated US entry into World War Two. Heinlein, though he had been forced to give up his first career as a naval officer due to pulmonary tuberculosis, tried absolutely everything to get enlisted again for the war. It seems the Japanese attack had an incredible galvanizing effect on US citizenry such that patriotic, able-bodied men (and women) were volunteering left and right, to the point that officers in charge of enlistment couldn’t keep up.

Though still medically unfit to serve, Heinlein was able to use a former officer contact to get in as a civilian engineer at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. His navy contact also requested that Heinlein, working with pulp giant, editor John W. Campbell, try to recruit — no joke — more science fiction writers to come do war work. In fact, in those early days of the new genre of science fiction, many of the writers did indeed have scientific or engineering training. Heinlein ended up bringing in a young Isaac Asimov (a recently minted chemistry PhD), and L. Sprague de Camp to work in the same research facility out of the yard as he.

Heinlein also ended up doing some minor engineering work that, unbeknownst to him, was related to the still top-secret development of radar technology. Across the pond, English SF giant, Arthur C. Clarke, was also working more directly on radar applications.

Pretty cool. When the world was in jeopardy, the allies called on their best genre writers to save the day. SF enthusiasts often claim their favourite authors can see into the future. When the Allies needed help, however, these writers were brought in to help create the future. Along with the bomb, radar was the top-secret, brand-new Allied technology of WWII. Future Nobel-winning scientists gave their best for the war effort, alongside future Hugo-winning sci-fi writers. Who’d have thought?