I finished Jim Ottaviani’s biography of Niels Bohr (Suspended in Language) last night. It was very good. I think his decision to use one artist (Leland Purvis) for everything but the endnotes was a good move and lent a cohesion to the text that it needed. Not that Ottaviani’s other multi-artist books lacked cohesion, exactly, but the one stumbling block for me has always been that no sooner was I used to one artist’s depiction of Feynman (for example), than I had to switch gears with the next artist and figure out which one was Feynman all over again. This was never really a problem for me — being married to a physicist, I’ve been exposed to enough physics history that I can distinguish many famous physicists on sight — but someone without my background may find it more of a challenge.
The challenge in this book is the quantum physics. My previous knowledge came in very handy here. Not that Ottaviani doesn’t present it clearly — it’s a subject so complex and counterintuitive that clarity, as such, is only possible to a very limited extent. If you think you’ve got it, that means you don’t.
And in essence, that’s what the book is about — the inadequacy of language to describe the brain-twisting weirdness of “reality” at the smallest scale, and the playful mind of one man who didn’t just tolerate paradox and contradiction, but positively reveled in them.
Two moments stand out for me: the first is where Bohr speaks to us directly about the conventions of language, using the conventions of comics (spaces between panels, the passage of time) to illustrate his meaning. Clearly, this is Ottaviani putting words in Bohr’s mouth, but Bohr has been so well-established as a character by this point that it’s completely believable (and I think Bohr would have understood and approved). Plus, the analogy is so astonishingly clear and obvious that it had to be pointed out somehow. Elegantly done.
The second is a single page, right at the very back of the book, comparing Bohr’s voice to the waves on Lake Michigan. It’s an unusually poetic passage — heck, it could almost be a poem — the text itself growing fainter as it progresses down the page. To me it conveys something of Ottaviani’s affection for Niels Bohr, as if the entire book weren’t testament to that already. And that is where the book has its biggest success: the depiction of one of history’s most fascinating minds. Bohr was not merely brilliant, but curious, idiosyncratic, and utterly unique.
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The upshot of all this, of course, is that I now feel compelled to formulate a quantum theory of babies. I mean, think about it — the parallels are astonishing. You’re dealing with human beings at the smallest scale. They move/poop/freak out at relativistic speeds. They behave in contradictory ways. Their moods and momentum depend a lot on how you interact with them. Just when you think you have them figured out it turns out that you don’t. Mere words cannot capture them.
I could publish a paper. Or I could start a daycare franchise called “Bohrgarten”, where the teachers speak very slowly and chuckle at the contradictory nature of their charges. Or I could just go take a nap now.
(An interesting note, by the way: I have now edited this entry three times, for typos and clarification of wording. That’s more than any other entry I’ve ever writen, and curiously apt.)
