Feynman Centenary

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Turns out that 100 years ago today, Richard Feynman was born. His contributions to physics – science in general – are huge, and if you dig a little you’ll find lots of discussion about him. His beautiful “Lectures on Physics…” books are deservedly legendary, and I wish that my old Imperial College lecturers had spent more time impressing upon us young impressionable undergraduate minds (c1986) to read those instead of urging us at every opportunity to read the famous “Surely You’re Joking…” book, which even back then in my naivety, I began to recognise as partly a physicist’s user manual for how to be a jerk to those around you. (I know I’m in the minority on this point…)

But anyway, in honour of the occasion, I give you a full page from my book containing a chat about the Feynman diagram. It’s an example of how something that’s essentially a cartoon can play a central role in understanding our world (something that’s of course, not unknown in cartoons…) Click the image above for an enlarged view.

-cvj

Frank Buckley Interviews…

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Turns out that Frank Buckley, the news anchor at KTLA 5, is not just a really great guy (evident from his manner on TV), but also a really excellent interviewer with a sharp curiosity that gives me hope that great journalism is still alive, well, and in good hands. I showed up at the station expecting to just have a pleasant chat around the book and be done with it, but I walked into the room and he’d done all his research and was sitting with extensive notes and so forth about lots of physics ideas he’d read in the book that he wanted to talk about! So we have a blast talking about the physics of our universe and the world around us in some in-depth detail. It was fantastic, and just the kind f conversation I hope that the book celebrates and inspires people to have!

Check out our interview here (embed below), and be sure to tune in to his Click to continue reading this post →

Take Your Pick

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I’ll at two festivals this weekend, which I admit seems a bit over-ambitious! Let me tell you a little about both.

One event is the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which you’ve read me talking about many times over the years (that’s a photo from 2015 above). It’s the largest such festival in the USA, and is a wonderful celebration of books and related things. It is on Saturday and Sunday.

The other event is the San Diego Comic Fest, which also runs through the weekend (although it starts Friday). Don’t mix this up with ComicCon (although there are connections between the two if you care to dig a little to find out).

As I write this post I’m actually basking in the sun as I ride on the train (the Pacific Surfliner) from Los Angeles to San Diego, as tomorrow I’ll be giving a talk at the comics fest. Here are the details:

Click to continue reading this post →

North Carolina Science Fair!

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Tomorrow I’ll be giving a talk at the North Carolina Science Festival! The talk will be about black holes, time, space, movies, and books, held inside the historic Morehead planetarium. I’ll sign the book for you after if you want.
Here is a link to the event.

(On the plane over, rather than doing my usual sketch-a-face-from-a-magazine exercise you might be familiar with from earlier posts, e.g. here, I made some new sketches for use in the talk. One of those is above.)

-cvj

An Exhibit!

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There’s actually an exhibit of process art for my book in the Fine Arts library at USC! Maybe of interest. There will be a companion exhibit about graphic novels over in the science and engineering library. Opening shortly.

A Chat with Henry Jenkins!

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Yesterday Henry Jenkins and I had a great chat as a Facebook Live event. The video is here. The conversation started with the movie Black Panther, but wandered into many topics related to culture, media, science, representation, and beyond. Among other things, we talked about what we enjoyed about the movie, what graphic novels and comics we’re reading now, and what comics source material we’d love to see given a film treatment. Oh, yes, we also mentioned The Dialogues!

Enjoy!

-cvj

Talk Nerdy!

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I was on the Talk Nerdy podcast recently, talking with host Cara Santa Maria about all sorts of things. It was a fun conversation ranging over many topics in science, including some of the latest discoveries in astronomy using gravitational waves in concert with traditional telescopes to learn new things about our universe. And yes, my book The Dialogues was discussed too! A link to the podcast is here. You can find Talk Nerdy on many of your favourite podcast platforms. Why not subscribe? The whole show is full of great conversations!

-cvj

Conversation Piece

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I wrote a piece for The Conversation recently that is making the rounds, drawing on lots of research sources (including reading some comics from the 1960s!). You might like it. Here it is:

The hidden superpower of ‘Black Panther’: Scientist role models

File 20180207 74473 zbs0ny.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1
King of a technologically advanced country, Black Panther is a scientific genius.
Marvel Studios

Clifford Johnson, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

I’m not the first to say that the upcoming Marvel movie “Black Panther” will be an important landmark. Finally a feature film starring a black superhero character will be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – a successful run of intertwined movies that began with “Iron Man” in 2008. While there have been other superhero movies with a black lead character – “Hancock” (2008), “Blade” (1998), “Spawn” (1997) or even “The Meteor Man” (1993) – this film is significant because of the recent remarkable rise of the superhero film from the nerdish fringe to part of mainstream culture.

Huge audiences will see a black lead character – not a sidekick or part of a team – in a superhero movie by a major studio, with a black director (Ryan Coogler), black writers and a majority black cast. This is a significant step toward diversifying our culture by improving the lackluster representation of minorities in our major media. It’s also a filmmaking landmark because black creators have been given access to the resources and platforms needed to bring different storytelling perspectives into our mainstream culture.

Last year’s “Wonder Woman” forged a similar path. In that case, a major studio finally decided to commit resources to a superhero film headlined by a female character and directed by a woman, Patty Jenkins. Female directors are a minority in the movie industry. Jenkins brought a new perspective to this kind of action movie, and there was a huge positive response from audiences in theaters worldwide.

Above and beyond all this, “Black Panther” also has the potential to break additional ground in a way most people may not realize: In the comics, Click to continue reading this post →

Two Events of Interest!

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This week there are two opportunities to hear me talk about The Dialogues in person, for you to ask questions, and to get your own personally signed copy!

On Thursday at 7:00pm I’ll be chatting with writer M. G. Lord at Vroman’s bookstore in Pasadena. We’ll talk about the book of course, but probably about science and art and writing and a whole lot of things in general. There’ll be a Q&A of course. Then I’ll sign the books you bring to me. More details here.

On Friday at 7:30pm I’ll chat with Griffith Observatory’s curator Laura Danly as part of their excellent All Space Considered show. It’ll be up at the Observatory and there’ll be a Q&A and of course books on hand for you to obtain and I’ll sign them for you. More details here.

Come to one, or come to both if you like, as time, geography, and tastes dictate. They’ll be quite different events with different emphases!

-cvj

Conversation Piece

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I wrote a piece for The Conversation two week ago. It turned out to be very well read. It concerns science, entertainment, and culture. I also discuss aspects of how my work on the book fits into the larger arc of my work on engaging the public with science. I hope that you like it. -cvj

New ways scientists can help put science back into popular culture

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Science is one thread of culture – and entertainment, including graphic books, can reflect that.
‘The Dialogues,’ by Clifford V. Johnson (MIT Press 2017), CC BY-ND

Clifford Johnson, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

How often do you, outside the requirements of an assignment, ponder things like the workings of a distant star, the innards of your phone camera, or the number and layout of petals on a flower? Maybe a little bit, maybe never. Too often, people regard science as sitting outside the general culture: A specialized, difficult topic carried out by somewhat strange people with arcane talents. It’s somehow not for them.

But really science is part of the wonderful tapestry of human culture, intertwined with things like art, music, theater, film and even religion. These elements of our culture help us understand and celebrate our place in the universe, navigate it and be in dialogue with it and each other. Everyone should be able to engage freely in whichever parts of the general culture they choose, from going to a show or humming a tune to talking about a new movie over dinner.

Science, though, gets portrayed as opposite to art, intuition and mystery, as though knowing in detail how that flower works somehow undermines its beauty. As a practicing physicist, I disagree. Science can enhance our appreciation of the world around us. It should be part of our general culture, accessible to all. Those “special talents” required in order to engage with and even contribute to science are present in all of us.

So how do we bring about a change? I think using the tools of the general Click to continue reading this post →

Process for The Dialogues

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Over on instagram (@asymptotia – and maybe here too, not sure) I’ll be posting some images of developmental drawings I did for The Dialogues, sometimes alongside the finished panels in the book. It is often very interesting to see how a finished thing came to be, and so that’s why I’m sharing this glimpse into my process. You might be interested to know that for every single finished element you see in the 240+ page book, there are many (sometimes very many) drawings that you don’t see that led to it. That’s one of the reasons the book took 6 years to draw. (Also, I was learning as I went, and only doing it in my spare time.)

You may have heard me talk about this a bit with Ira Flatow and Janna Levin on Science Friday, and on the Science Friday site (audio there too) there two examples of the process drawings, so go there and have a look if you like. Above is another I prepared for them that they did not have room for (click for a larger view).

This one shows the design process for an entire page. The original pencil sketch on the left is actually only about 2in across, and you can see me working out the elements that eventually became the finished page on the right. Follow @asymptotia on instragram for more in the coming days and weeks!

-cvj

Nice to be Back…

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Back where? In front of a classroom teaching quantum field theory, that is. It is a wonderful, fascinating, and super-important subject, and it has been a while since I’ve taught it. I actually managed to dig out some pretty good notes for the last time I taught it. (Thank you, my inner pack rat for keeping those notes and putting them where I could find them!) They’ll be a helpful foundation. (Aren’t they beautiful by the way? Those squiggly diagrams are called Feynman diagrams.)

Important? Quantum field theory (QFT) is perhaps one of the most remarkable Click to continue reading this post →