[ Silence ]
>> Roxanne Bogucka: I'm Roxanne Bogucka.
I'd like to welcome you to Science Study Break, a UT
Libraries program where we evaluate
presentations of science and popular culture.
Typically what you see when you come to one of our Science
Study Break presentations is the popular
culture is usually a TV show or a movie,
but we've been itching to get into
graphic novels for some time.
And we couldn't have asked for a better entre to graphic
novels than having Jim Ottaviani here this evening.
So first, there are a few housekeeping things.
Here's the legalese.
As you can see, there is a gentleman in the back who is
recording this program and you'll be
able to relive it later out on YouTube.
But if for some reason you can't be recorded and broadcast,
then you need to, you know, pull your hoodie
up now or something so you can't be seen.
Okay. Okay.
We very much thank all of you for
coming out on a Friday evening.
It's wonderful to see such participation and such interest,
and we also thank our generous sponsors, the University
Federal Credit Union who's made it possible for us
to do bigger and better and more programs this year.
So thank you University Federal Credit Union.
[ Applause ]
>> Roxanne Bogucka: If you're new to Science Study Break,
we're entering out sixth year, and you can see some
of the programs that we've done in the past here.
Things like Mega Monsters with Anne Silverman talking about
the mechanical engineering aspects
of Godzilla and King Kong.
Or we had Sam Scarpino talk about epidemiology
from the point of view of a zombie outbreak.
Lots of these programs have been recorded in the past and
like I said you can find them out on the YouTube channel.
If you'd like to suggest a Science Study Break, you might
notice there's some little half
sheets on the arms of your chairs.
That's the feedback form that we'd
like you to fill out before you leave.
There's pencils and pens at the back if you don't have one.
And so if there's a presenter that you think would be a good
candidate for Science Study Break,
or a show or a graphic novel,
or a movie that you would love to
see explored, then do let us know.
Now I want to let you know about a
couple of thing that are coming up.
I want to invite you back next Wednesday for a program
called Research + Pizza, where we have Matt Fajkus
from the school of architecture who is going to talk
about sustainable architecture design strategies.
And this is going to be in the UFCU student
learning commons at PCL at noon on Wednesday.
A smaller event where you can sort of get into
conversation with the researcher about what's going on.
Also we have our next Science Study Break coming up in
October where Professor Emeritus Claud Bramblett is
going to look at scenes from the documentary project NIM,
and then from Planet of the Apes movies, to talk about apes.
So be there.
Okay. If you'd like to follow Science Study Break and see
about all of our upcoming events then you can follow us on
Twitter @SciStudyBreak , or UT Life Science Library @utlsl.
You can also follow us on Facebook.
And if you're Tweeting us tonight,
the hashtag is #SSBFeynman.
Okay. It's a good idea to follow us at some of these places
because not only will you hear about up
coming programs, but you also get details
on the upcoming Science Study Break t-shirt design contest.
Stay tuned.
Okay. If you're interested in becoming a biographer, you can
also use some of the UT Library
resources like our databases by type.
You might start with our biographical sources and see
several data bases like Dictionary of Scientific
Biography might be a place you wanted to go.
Or maybe you would want to look into the history of science
technology and medicine for example,
so that you could look up a researcher
and then be pointed to articles that you could read.
So you too could follow in the footsteps of Jim Ottaviani.
Getting started with resources from the UT Libraries.
So let's talk about Jim Ottaviani, our guest this evening.
Jim is a man of arts.
He has a background in science, he has a BS at the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne and a Master's
degree in nuclear engineering from the University
of Michigan and then he spent several years
retrofitting and fixing nuclear power plants.
But he was interested in the research component of his job
and so he started taking library science courses at
Drexel University to be, become a better researcher,
and he like that well enough that he enrolled in a library
and information science program
at the University of Michigan
and got a Master of Science in
Information and Library Studies.
Then he spent several years working as a reference librarian
at Michigan's Media Union Library, and now he works at the
University of Michigan Library as coordinator of Deep Blue,
which is the university's institutional repository.
He's written several graphic novels and he also recently
appeared on an episode of a Science
Channel show, Dark Matters.
Feynman is his book, I believe, with First Second Books.
And he has a fourth coming book about three
primatologists Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Birut?
Galdikas. And you should look forward to that and you've
got a real treat coming here, so welcome to Jim Ottaviani.
[ Applause ]
>> Jim Ottaviani: Thanks.
Thank you everybody for coming.
It's a Friday night.
I'm not sure I would have done this if I was a student.
But I'm really grateful that you did.
And I'm really pleased to be in Austin.
I've come here a couple times for library events,
but never been invited to talk about comics.
And comics is a, is something that I like to talk about a
great deal as those who have been in some of the classes
and seminars that I've been invited to attend this, today.
Can I test you, so if you've already been to, to one of the
talks that I've given brief, there, there are
parts where you can snooze or go get more pizza,
and this is really good pizza whoever
decided on this, I, I compliment you.
What I'm here to talk about is Feynman the book,
Feynman the person, and more generally comics.
And specifically why we did what we did, and
what we left out in the process of doing it.
So let's get the elephant out of the room right away.
Why would anybody even do this?
Comics about scientists is not the first thing that
comes to mind when people think about literature.
Or even communicating science to other folks.
But I would argue, obviously I would argue this because I am
who I am, that it's actually very, very natural to do that.
And the reason I would argue is because of alchemy.
And here is an alchemical text right here.
It's from one of our favorite alchemists, Isaac Newton.
And you'll notice if you survey through alchemical text that
there are (a) very few pictures, and (b) a very strong
desire to not communicate while staking a claim to something
that is allegedly very important but
you don't want to tell anybody about.
Now I'm not going to argue that this, a Feynman diagram
named after the guy that we're all interested in, is any
more obvious to the average reader than this thing was.
But the Feynman diagram, as developed by the subject of the
evening, is specifically designed to
communicate, to facilitate understanding,
and to allow people to make new discoveries themselves.
And I would say science and imagery have been
related, tied together, for many, many years.
In fact starting with minus 1700 we've got this cuneiform
tablet which is demonstrating how to calculate what?
The square root of two.
And I'm going to need a cheat sheet for some
of these other images as I roll through.
But here's Copernicus in 1543, demonstrating a new system
for the universe which got him in a bit of trouble.
Maybe he would have been better off not using pictures,
for pop up books ever, and it was to teach geometry.
Here's Riccioli, again summarizing Copernicus in
post-Copernicus theories on the, on the
universe and we're not up to 19, 1651.
Here's Isaac Newton again.
But this time trying to tell you something.
And it actually works quite well.
A guy named Playfair he's a practitioner of
what many people think of as the dismal science.
He was an economist.
And these are the first pie charts
that have ever been recorded.
Von Humboldt showing the types of plants that live along the
equatorial plane and what better demonstration of
how things change with altitude and with rain fall
than to actually show a cross section
of a mountain by the equator.
We probably all recognize these finches from Darwin in 1839.
And while I don't have a credit for
this I do know roughly when it happened.
And I use it specifically because not because it's just a
particularly interesting image, but just to
note that if you take out the figure numbers
and maybe put boxes around it, you do in fact get comics.
[Laughter] It, it doesn't have the narrative thrust or
storyline that you would expect maybe from
Calvin and Hobbs, but it's there right then.
Here's Niels Bohr's hydrogen atom.
He actually proposed the model initially in 1913, but I'm, I
was trying to play fair with the
credit from, for the actual image here.
Here is Lemaître in graphing the Big Bang theory and
demonstrating how he things the,
the universe started to evolve.
And Edward Hubble, here again we've almost got a story
happening with this diagram about the evolution of galaxies.
Feynman in 1949, you'll see this image a lot this evening.
1953 everybody recognizes this notion of a double
helix and this is Crick's first sketch of that.
And an image that launched a thousand comic strips from
a guy named Howell, because it's perfect as comics.
[Laughter] So we get this, and then we get this, and
actually this is my favorite and it's a relatively
recent one from Dan Piraro [Laughter] And,
and the reason [Laughter] and the reason I like this
is because it works regardless of what you believe.
I think it's funny for both sides of, of
that, that's probably not a discussion.
Well anyway, I said, I think it's funny.
And here finally is a graph of Moore's Law which I, which I
use to, to point out and to tell you that
the use of images in science is prevalent
and in fact it's doubling about every ten years.
That's actually a made up fact.
That's not true.
[Laughter] But I wouldn't be surprised
if it actually does hold for images.
Because when the going gets rough, and it's often rough
going in terms of scientific communication,
the rough use picture, the tough use pictures.
So let's go back to Moore's Law which he proposed,
and just look at it as it actually is right now.
Which would you rather use and interpret?
This thing or this thing, when it comes to determining
what's going on with semi conductor
speed and power density in, in computers?
So I'm pushing the metaphor pretty hard here.
I've gone from actually showing images, I've actually gone
from a clay tablet to a graph saying this is all scientific
communication using images, but I don't think it's unfair
to do that because it's all about using something other than
the pure abstraction of language to try to communicate
complicated ideas both to one's peers and to people
who wouldn't otherwise know anything
about what you're talking about.
Pictures really do work.
So they work for one other reason as well.
It's not just that they're comics,
or that they're models of the world.
It's because of this word.
It's saccade.
And you may think you're staring at me, or starring
judiciously away from me as I try to make
eye contact with you, but you're not.
Your eye is moving at about 70, 70
twitches per second all over the place.
And what's happening is you're creating a little pattern
here with the way you focus when you look at my face.
And I don't know about you, but when I see something like
this, and then I look at the saccade picture
of what's going on, I immediately leap to that.
[Laughter] So like it or not, you're
making comics right now.
Again there's, there's not much story to
what you're doing, but I think that's okay.
So now let me try to deliver a little bit on the promise
that I made in the initial slide and start
talking about what we did with Feynman in,
in making the graphic novel and
also particularly what we left out.
How many people here have actually
heard of Richard Feynman before?
A great number, a great number.
So that provides a challenge for someone who wants to write
about him in a new way, because the standard narrative
that we sort of develop in our heads once you,
once we're talking about a famous figure, is this notion of
a great man, born to greatness, who
does great things, the end, he died.
And there's really not much story to that,
and it's not much fun to do things this way.
Because life isn't really like this at all.
It's not linear, that's my math, first math joke.
It's not parabolic, that's my second math joke.
And except for maybe Feynman it's not even hyperbolic.
So what we did when we decided we wanted to present the life
of Feynman is actually take a queue from that non-linearity
and also a queue from the way he tended to tell stories
about himself as well in some of his famous books,
particularly Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman,
in What Do You Care About What Other People Think.
And we did it out of order.
So I'm, I'm showing you panels from the book, and these are
the first few scenes exactly as they appear in the book.
So we start in 1964, just before he wins the Nobel Prize.
We zip back to 1923 with a side bar into 1986.
And with this image you can tell that we're not providing a
literal telling of his life since, that is, in fact what
you think it is, stomping through Far Rockaway, New York.
Then we zip over to 1987 and all of a sudden we've got a
much older Feynman interacting with dinosaurs, back
to 1927 where he's a young man, about 10 years old.
Then we zip past the Nobel Prize to him giving a
speech in Far Rockaway, talking about what he had done.
And then to 1931 when he's about to meet his wife to be.
And I say this all by way of introducing the notion that we
have, oops, that always happens on
that slide, I don't know why I do that.
Introducing this notion of non-linearity to the story
telling to provide some type of narrative thrust.
And Feynman said this about, and this is from his Nobel
lecture that he gave in Sweden,
not the one at his high school.
We have this habit of doing things that we
cover all our tracks and make it super polished.
So this is the famous article that
introduced those Feynman diagrams.
And everything is laid out nice and neat.
The blocks of texts are square.
The pros is very precise.
And Feynman didn't want to do it that way all the time.
So in fact, this is another bit from his speech to the
Nobel, to the Nobel audience saying, saying that he's
going to include some stuff that really has nothing to do
with the science, but it's there to be more entertaining,
because Feynman knew something that a lot of us
forget soon after we stop reading for pleasure.
Right about freshman year in college I think, which is that
stories are what make learning worthwhile in, in large part.
And in fact stories aid learning a great deal.
So that meant in, in doing this and in taking Feynman's
advice about dealing with the physics when talking
to a broad audience maybe not at
all or as only part of the story.
That means that here, when we're showing Feynman working out
the theory of helium in, in the
book, we're telling more of a story
than showing so much about what he actually did with this.
And it's Feynman himself remembering the setting, the way
the desk looked, he, but what he was trying
to get at was this sort of emotional state.
And Feynman was a very precise scientific kind of guy.
So I'm translating psychological condition to emotional
state, but he was actually very interested in this.
And trying to figure out how he got to discover this one
beautiful fact that he was convinced he was the
only person in the universe to know at the time.
And what Feynman does is try to remember that he got to a
certain point and then he backed
off in his discovery and said,
let me look at all the facts again
and just tap it a little bit.
Tap it lightly and maybe it'll crystallize for me.
Now we're - Leland and I obviously tried to mess around with
this notion because we didn't really
believe Feynman just tapped it.
He wasn't the kind of guy to tap anything.
He dove in head first.
So we had to decide between that tap and this bonk
that he's doing against the side of the panel.
But for the most part, in the book anyway, we tapped at the
physics very lightly because we were
very interested in telling a story
of this man's life that included
science but wasn't just science.
In part because if you're going to show the life of
a theoretical physicist you'd have panels like this.
In fact you'd have tiers of panels like this and
maybe even pages of panels like this all the way.
And you know that's nice for, oh, a presentation, but
I'm not sure anybody would actually buy a book that
[ Laughter ]
was 260 pages straight of that nonsense.
So we left out a lot...unfortunately.
What we left in.
And here's a quote from Feynman: "People love how to..."
If you're going to say crack a safe, and people who know
Feynman know that he was in fact a safe
cracker as a hobby, especially during his time
at Los Alamos while working on the first atomic bomb.
They're really interested in knowing how to do it.
So he, he said so himself, except
actually I'm lying here again.
This is not Feynman, this is George Roy Hill, the director
for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid, the Sting and many other things.
But I normalized Hill's language a little bit to actually
match something Feynman did say because
he agrees with Hill about storytelling.
And it's that people really do love to learn.
And I think we're all here because of that.
People love to learn.
And in, in Feynman's original quote he put scare quotes
around entertained, but I like it without
so, and I'm giving the presentation
and he's not, so I left them out to be straightforward.
They're entertained enormously by being allowed to
understand a little bit of something
they didn't understand before.
Feynman knew this about telling stories and about teaching.
And that's why, when the, the YouTube videos that Roxanne
was showing as people were filing in, you notice that he
was often just telling a story while he was also slipping
in a very serious lecture about what's knowable
and unknowable in science for instance.
So we did tell a little bit about Feynman's work on quantum
electro dynamics with Feynman being very satisfied that
QED's does in fact explain how mirrors work, very good.
And we show him talking about how to do these sorts
of thought experiments and calculations in his head.
So I'm just going to zip through here.
I'm not, I'm not going to expect
you to actually read anything.
But notice that if you've ever watched him lecture and, as
Roxanne showed, there are plenty of
opportunities to see him on YouTube,
you'll see that he was a very visual person,
very demonstrative, a lot of gestures.
But we did have to leave a lot of stuff out, even
so, even when we just got to the story of his life.
And there have actually been some criticisms of the book
that I've read, some of them very
good and which I've, you know,
like check don't do that next time
in the next graphic novel.
But some of those criticisms have, have focused on the fact
that Feynman is, was a great writer
himself, or at least a great storyteller
from which other people would transcribe his writing.
And you can learn a lot and see a lot
just by reading Feynman's own words.
And some people have said, there's way too much
of these two books in our book about Feynman.
And this actually makes me very happy
because I'm the kind of guy I am.
I've done the math, and that's about how
much of any of those books is in our book.
There was so much to leave out.
So when people, sorry, never do that.
So when people are, are saying I got a feel for Feynman just
the way I got from those books, like Feynman
talking about his own lectures, you know,
I'm not dissatisfied with being criticized
for sounding too much like Feynman in there.
So this is actually what we did leave out from all
the, from, from those two really popular books.
And I know the print is too small.
But so that you can't really read it.
But you should read those, Surely You're Joking
and What do You Care What Other People Think.
If only to read to Hotel City and Any Questions.
So why did we leave, leave all this stuff out?
[ Background sounds ]
>> Jim Ottaviani: And here again I, I fall to
Feynman to guide me in what I should have done.
This is a, a quote from a letter that he wrote to a German
publisher after his very first book came
out, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.
And the German publisher who wanted to do a translated
edition had contacted Feynman saying, you know look, this is
a great book it's, it's a best seller in the United States,
and I know it's doing well all over the world, and we're
putting together a German edition, but the translator
and I have decided that there are some pieces of the book
that are just not important for the German reader.
And we would like to remove those.
And Feynman replied, with a very strongly worded letter,
that and this is some of the nicest
things he said to that publisher.
Basically saying, look if you want to have only the
important stuff, you have to take it all
away, because it's none of its important.
It's not even an autobiography, it's just a bunch
of stuff that I thought people would find amusing.
So Feynman knew and had to teach me and Leland
that a bunch of stories is not the same as a story.
So we, we did leave some things out from
the book, from his personal life as well.
There was a period in his life where he was not
particularly happy in his personal relationships.
He had a second marriage that did not go well and did not
last long, and here's a scene from that marriage, one of
the few that we show, where his somewhat clueless partner
at the time says, you know this old boar called for you.
And the physics majors have probably
all, already gotten the joke.
This is a man named Niels Bohr,
the founder of quantum mechanics.
And Feynman saying wait, wait a minute,
which is it, an old boar, or The Old Bohr?
And as you can see his wife didn't
really see the difference.
And there's a, a major one with that.
And this is one of many, and this is sort of a trivial
humorous example of why that marriage
didn't work out particularly well.
So we left a lot of that stuff
away and, and we did this why?
Because I think Tolstoy was wrong.
And, and what I'm saying about Tolstoy is, there's a very
famous line from the beginning of Anna Karenina, which
again I'm going to read so that I don't misquote it.
And it's this: "All happy families are alike,
each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
And that's a great opening line for a book, but it's not the
type of, it's not the story of
Feynman's life, I don't think.
Because the story of Feynman, the real story of Feynman's
life was how he started with a very happy
family, the family he was born into, his mother,
his father, his sister Joan who also became a scientist.
Then another happy family that he created with his first
wife, Arlene, and she was very ill at the time they married.
Then there's this period where it's not so great but then he
rebounds and creates the ultimate as in the final one that
he needs, happy family with, with his third wife Gwyneth
and his son Carl and his, his daughter Michelle.
And that's the story we really, really wanted to tell.
And again we left a little bit, we left a little bit of the
science in but Feynman's impact and career was so vast that
we had to leave most of that out and this time we left it
out because Feynman's cabby was right about his science.
In that there was situation soon after he won the Nobel
Prize, he's getting interviewed
on TV as Nobel Prize winners do.
And as TV interviewers tend to do tell me in as short a
time as possible, why you won the Nobel Prize for physics.
And Feynman had been struggling with this, he was failing on
TV and, and Feynman was not a guy who was used to failing.
He was struggling with this and he couldn't figure out why.
And finally a cab driver delivered
to, to him the answer why.
And this is one of, one of a, a relatively few number of
time where Feynman makes himself look a little bit bad
in a story just because it's way funnier to make sure
that you get the cab driver to, to deliver
the good line and not Feynman himself.
So [Laughter] what would Feynman think
about doing a graphic novel about himself?
That's something that was running through my mind the whole
time I was researching it and writing it and even more
so while Leyland the artist was spending the roughly
two years that it took him to draw the darn thing.
And I'm still not 100 percent sure but
there's an instant from Feynman's life.
It comes relatively late in his life, in fact, that I think
provides us a little bit of guidance of what, what Feynman
would actually think about this nonsense over here.
And here's the context.
His kids are, I think ten and six, something like that.
His friend Ralph Leighton is over for dinner that evening.
And they're, they're finishing up the meal.
And as often happens in elementary school and in middle
school, quizzing, quizzing the
kids on what they learned today.
And there, there was this geography thing and we're learning
the capitals of the various countries, and stuff like that.
And Feynman says, did you learn about Tuva?
And this is early 80's I believe.
And so the Soviet Union is still fully, fully functional,
well as functional as the Soviet Union ever was.
And everybody at the table says Tuva?
There couldn't be any such place,
that's, that's a really goofy name.
Feynman of course knew because he had been a stamp collector
when he was a little kid and he had gotten some Tuvian
stamps, and they're really neat looking, they're,
they're big triangles and big diamonds and if
they're really nice engraving and cool colors.
So he knew Tuva existed.
They pull out the, they pull out the Atlas and they're
looking for Tuva and there they find it,
right in the middle of Soviet Russia.
And they're poking around because they'd been talking about
capitals, and they find the capital
name, and it's Kyzyl, K-Y-Z-Y-L.
And everybody looks up and says anyplace that has a capital
that has no real vowels in it has
got to be an interesting place to go.
So they decide right then and there that they
want to go to Tuva, the whole family does.
And so Feynman and his friend Ralph
start trying to make this happen.
The first thing they do is send a note to In Tourist which
was the official Soviet Union tourist agency who re, respond
politely but firmly that Kyzyl is impossible to visit.
I'm sorry, there's just no way to get there.
It's in a forbidden zone or something.
And as you can imagine Feynman was cool with that,
and they said, oh well we'll do something else.
No he wasn't cool with that at all.
He's going to decide along with, along with Ralph
and Gwyneth and everybody how to get to Kyzyl.
And that's the context for this clip and that's a really
like prelude to what would Feynman think
about doing a graphic novel about science.
So here's Feynman.
>> Richard Feynman: It's very simple.
I promote to give some lectures in
Russia, they will be delighted I think.
[Laughter] I come there and they say that one
of the conditions is that I travel to Tuva.
And they say indeed it's fine.
[Laughter] And I say what, I give the
lectures in Moscow after I visit Tuva.
[Laughter] I say, and they'll have to say yes to that.
>> Jim Ottaviani: So while you were laughing
he said, having learned a little bit you see.
So here's Feynman.
And I would argue that he's doing science right here.
I've got a theory and I can in fact do a Gedanken
experiment, I did it again, a thought experiment
and see how things might play out with my theory.
I say I want to go to Tuva they say great, sure Dr. Feynman.
I say I'll give some lectures in Moscow, they say
even better come on over we'll pay your expenses.
And then I say, I give the lectures after I get to the
place that I really want to go to, and then they're stuck.
If it's not science, it's at least engineering, right?
[Laughter] So he's got that going.
>> Richard Feynman: I definitely understood
before why I, I don't want to do it that way.
And now I suddenly do.
The whole idea is to have adventure.
The way to have adventure is to do things in a low level,
it's not to ride on the freeway
and to stop at the Holiday Inn.
>> Jim Ottaviani: So he has science in his hands, I would
argue here that he's saying, I'd
rather have art in this case.
So what would Feynman think about our
sacrificing a little bit of truth?
Leaving some stuff out of the book in favor
of getting a little better story out of it?
Well I don't really know because Feynman's
been dead unfortunately for quite a while.
But I have my best guess.
And I hope I'm right.
That's all I've got for formal bit.
I'd love to hear from you.
[ Applause ]
>> Jim Ottaviani: Yeah, you were the first hand up.
>> What graphic novels are you interested in?
Which author?
>> Jim Ottaviani: Oh my goodness.
I, I was asked this question at the, the, the,
among the librarians today too and I choked on it.
And I'm probably still going to choke.
I told, it's, their actual question
was what are you reading right now.
And the book that is right by my bed is book
called Infinite Kung Fu by Kagan McLeod.
[Laughter] Not really highbrow but it is fantastic.
I'm really enjoying it.
I read quite a number of graphic novels.
The ones that have made the most impact on my have tended to
be the true stories or things that have really
challenged the boundaries of a particular genre.
So you think of a book like Watchman.
You think of a book like Maus, by Art Spiegelman.
Watchmen was by Alan Moore and Dave Givens.
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is one.
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel.
I, I could just go on and on.
There, there are so many good things.
I was speaking to some elementary school kids a couple days
ago at Los Alamos, and I wanted to remind them that
when their parents say the good ole days were better,
they may have been right about some things,
but they're totally wrong about comics.
Because this is much better environment for
reading comics than it was when I was a kid.
There are so many more types of books - oh, I just thought
of Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gora?de - I,
I do non-fiction comics all the time
and people have said, oh that's
so admirable, that's wonderful.
Joe Sacco gets shot at in, in Bosnia, and
imprisoned in Palestine to do his comic reporting.
That's actually admirable.
The paper cut that I got in the Caltech
Archives is just not, doesn't stack up.
Oh yes, thank you.
>> What is the process of creating a graphic novel like?
>> Jim Ottaviani: Maybe I can shutter all the way back to
that, that issue of sitting and
thinking over and over again.
So the, but you, you meant something different.
>> Yeah.
>> Jim Ottaviani: So I should actually honestly answer
your question rather than just fool around with it.
The way I do it, leaving, leaving aside the research part
which you can probably imagine what that is in fact
like, reading lots of books, listening to lots of audio
to get his voice working inside my head
so that one, you know I'm typing dialogue.
It has the flavor of Feynman's cadence and things like that.
Leaving aside all those things what I, the way it starts for
me anyway is, and again I'm going to
make this up because I don't always start
at the very beginning when I write,
but it's page one, panel one.
Jim is in the auditorium at UT Austin, he's wearing
a black shirt, and sort of olive greenie pants.
There's a whole bunch of people here.
Some of them are here just for the pizza but that's cool.
And you actually do put that sort of thing in a script
because you want to give the artist a feel for
the setting not just the facts of the setting.
But then I would, you know, describe, describe the way the
building looks, or the way the
interior of the building looks.
And then go on to show, you know, say and
Feynman says this or Joan his sister says that.
And on and on and on.
I tend to specify page breaks because in comics there's this
very interesting phenomenon that you can hide stuff
from readers by hiding it behind an even numbered page.
So if you want a surprise to happen you put it at the top of
an odd numbered page, so that you get, when
you, when you turn the next page you can't skim
and see the surprise until you turn it again sort of thing.
And so it's very detailed, very, very specific.
When I'm asking for a tricky layout of panels, if it's not
just going to be a grid of nine squares or whatever,
sometimes I'll sketch that out for an artist.
And if it's going to be a particular composition within one
of those panels or frames, sometimes I'll sketch that out
myself in stick figure form, I'm not a very good artist.
But I need to be able to demonstrate, at least to myself
that what I've asked for is in fact drawable, because we
could describe this auditorium in, you know, in great detail
and it would take maybe a paragraph
to get a pretty good sense of that.
But then asking an artist to realize that in a single image
is very difficult, and so sometimes
when I have a question in my head
of whether what I have asked for is in fact possible.
I'll try to sketch it myself, and if I can't sketch it even
in stick figure form, I got to start again
and come up with something that's good.
Then off it goes to the artist.
And depending on the type of project and the amount of
trust, mutual trust we have, sometimes
there's very little interaction.
In fact that was the case with Feynman.
Leyland and I talked very rarely
while he was working on the book.
But I knew his work, and I knew
his, his story editor was excellent.
So I would have just been in the way if I, you
know I'd said my peace with this 280 page script.
And if he has questions he'll ask me.
And then you go from there.
Sometimes it's much more interactive though.
Is that the sort of thing that you wanted to hear about?
Yeah. Great.
Yeah.
>> Do you think you could write a graphic novel even if
you're a scientist, do you think that
Richard Feynman is a unique character?
>> Jim Ottaviani: You asked the loaded question, could
I write a graphic novel about any other scientist.
>> If you were to write a graphic novel of another
scientist, do you think that it would still be as
stimulating to read or do you think he's more unique?
>> Jim Ottaviani: Oh good question.
If it would be as good or interesting.
So I've written a graphic novel about
Neils Bohr, my other physics hero.
I don't know if it's as stimulating.
I certainly had fun doing it.
I think it's up to, it's more on me than it is on the
character because if there's enough in a
character Neils Bohr, Jane Goodall, Alan Turing,
I'm cherry picking because these are all people I've
written about or am in the process of completing a book on.
There, there's something to their lives
that attracted me in the first place.
And I'm convinced that I can carry it through visually.
So I, I'm sure there's somebody that's just so
horribly boring that it wouldn't be worth doing.
But it, it would, it probably wouldn't even, you'd probably
learn that in the course of the research before you even
got to the point of handing the script off to the artist.
I hope so anyway.
I saw, yeah...
>> You commented that formatting is rather important in the
book, if they were doing an eBook version of this wouldn't
this offer you a lot more formatting opportunities?
Wouldn't that book look quite differently than this one?
>> Jim Ottaviani: Yes I think it would.
I think an eBook version of this
might indeed look very different.
And if I was designing something to be initially presented
in electronic form, or on the web,
I would do different things.
Funny you should mention this.
I just finished writing a script for a story about Alan
Turing, the mathematician and computer scientist, who
also worked as a code breaker during World War II.
And its initial publication will be on the web
via the science fiction company Tor, Tor.com.
And it's going to be a while so you'll probably
forget although this is being recorded, right.
So, but, I had one panel, one page, run continuously
sideways for dozens and dozens and dozens
and dozens of panels to get a point across.
And so when, when you're going to experience that on, on the
web, or on the iPad, you're going to be doing
this constantly rather than up and down.
So yes, once you know that that's going to
happen, you can do something very different.
And I hope interesting things.
This was, this book was originally designed to be printed,
and shown in, you know, this sort
of, these standard page format.
So stuck with that in terms of the storytelling choices.
But again, you're absolutely right, once you know you can do
something different, as, as soon as I knew it was
going to be serialized I changed the way I thought
about how I might want to tell the story to
get some of these really interesting affects.
I hope it's interesting.
It may just end up being annoying for
the reader to go sideways constantly.
We'll find out.
And right, yeah right in front of him.
Yeah.
>> I was wondering, what's the significance of the punchline
"In this is the Smartest Man on Earth, God help us."
>> Jim Ottaviani: Well if you open up the
jacket flap, you'll find out who said it.
And that's the significance.
>> Yeah.
>> Jim Ottaviani: It's no secret.
You don't, it's not giving away anything in the book.
That was his mom.
[Laughter] So that's why we used that.
I was, I was actually a little dicey on using that quote.
It's a little bit too irreverent for my tastes but people
seemed to like, so I'm, I'm often
wrong about marketing decisions.
Way in the back.
>> Oh I was wondering who was your favorite person that
you've written about, and what makes someone (inaudible)?
>> Jim Ottaviani: My favorite person
that I've written about?
Well it, it does remain a tie between Niels Bohr my one
physics hero, so much of a favorite
that I named my cat Niels.
And Richard Feynman.
Niels my cat is not really all that smart, so [Laughter] but
yea I, I think it would be two, those
two people would be the A number one.
But the, the sort of cheesy authory answer that is actually
also true, I'll wait for, so you can
catch the t-shirt [Laughter] The,
the sort of cop out sounding author answer is the person I'm
working on, because what you find out,
even when they are scoundrels, and I,
I wrote a book about the early Paleontologists,
Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh.
And these guys were not good guys.
If, if you spend enough time trying to be inside their heads
so you can get them to act out the story
that you want to see on the page, they're,
they're life story you kind of end up liking them anyway.
And so all of, all of the characters start to become
sympathetic and I think if you talk to any writer of
biography or of novels you'll hear a very similar reaction
in that I spent so much time with this person even though
it's a biography of you know pick
your favorite evil or mean person.
I found I sympathized at least a little bit with some of
what happened in their lives, or some of the things they
did because you do spend all that, all that time with them
and like I said, trying to get inside your head.
Yes.
>> He's a multi-faceted person.
>> Jim Ottaviani: Yes.
>> He was a scientist and also a musician, and I'm really
wondering is, how do you think of the relationship between
scientist and musician and relation of generally artist?
Or is there any chance - I'm majoring in
engineering - to have a relationship to the artist?
>> Jim Ottaviani: I'm not sure I got, got the last part
of the question, but let me answer the first part first.
So the question was, Feynman was a multi-faceted person, he
was particularly a musician and an artist, and what do
I think about why that occurred, or how that occurred.
Is that right?
>> Yes.
>> Jim Ottaviani: And he had so, Feynman in particular,
appeared to have so much energy and so much joy of life, he
was just fundamentally interested in the world as a whole.
And I think that's part of what made him a great scientist
is his curiosity, his interest in trying
new things, and seeing how they worked,
and it led him in that Nobel lecture I showed a, a panel
from, from the very beginning of the book,
where he's talking to his high school.
In that scene he tells how he was miserable at many, many
subjects which he was now trying
to correct in his adulthood.
He was trying to learn more languages.
He was trying to become a, learn, learn to draw.
And I think this desire to learn and to experience
more was fundamental to what made him great.
So what was the second question, I, I missed it.
>> My main question is the relationship
between the scientist and the artist.
>> Jim Ottaviani: Oh the relationship
between scientists and artists.
I think, I think it might be this.
The ability to focus on a problem whether it's a
problem of composition or a problem of physics.
And then concentrate your energies on it and then at the
same time be extremely creative in the
way you think or the way you approach it.
There's a quote from Feynman that, that I sometimes use.
The type of game I play is a very interesting one.
It's imagination in a straight jacket.
And being able to imagine fully within the constraints of
what you know and what you can do is some, is a
skill or, or a gift maybe that not many of us have
to imagine all the possibilities, try out many of them in
our head, in their heads, and then apply
the ones that seem the most promising.
And to me anyway I think that's how
the sciences and the arts relate.
They're just applied into different realms.
Yes. I saw you, you like held your hand up the whole time.
>> Did you contemplate naming one of your cats Schrödinger?
>> Jim Ottaviani: I [Laughter]
I, I have not contemplated that.
It's a little too easy.
So if I were going to do I would
probably name it, name it Erwin instead.
Just to be slightly obscure.
You're the next person I saw.
Sorry.
>> I was just curious if you got into graphic novels and
comics specifically to explain science, or you had prior
interest in it as a kid maybe, as to comics in general?
>> Jim Ottaviani: Yeah I certainly, I certainly
enjoyed reading comics most of my life.
I wasn't much of a comic book reader until college.
But I certainly read the comic strips, you know Calvin
and Hobbes, Peanuts, Doonesbury, all, all these things.
I got interested in applying them to science once
I realized that nobody else was going to do it.
And I knew all these great, you know, the Galileo story.
It's amazing story, not all that many people know it.
Feynman's story is an amazing story.
The story of Hedy Lamarr, the film star, who is responsible
for the cell phone technology that's in
your pocket right now, amazing story.
But these are things that not a lot of people knew.
Some people only will approach storytelling through comics.
So I wanted to see if maybe I could
get these out there for them.
And there was someone right here.
Yes.
>> Right. To that end your audience is kind of, what we're
seeing here, with the intent on
taking you down to the lower level
to inspire younger students, children
to be involved in science and math...
>> Jim Ottaviani: Yes.
Right. So the, I'm, I'm glad you pointed
out the audience that I'm seeing here.
If, if I had given this talk 15 years ago, there probably
would be two women in the room as comics readers anyway.
There would be more than that as physicists, but as
people who had read comics before there would be very few.
This room kind of looks like the rest of the world, which is
not what I'm used to coming from comic
book conventions, which is kind of nice.
[Laughter] To go to the, to the younger
reader level, the answer is yes.
So the book I did just previous to
Feynman was a book called T-Minus.
It was about the space race and it was targeted
at, say the eight to 12 year old age range.
My friend and the artist for the book, Zander Cannon, he and
I, and Kevin Cannon also worked on the book, and
they're not related, but they share a studio.
Zander and I decided very early on that we, we were going
to make these ten year olds bring their A game to the book.
So it's a little bit of a higher level, so much so that it
got more reviews like in the mainstream press like the New
York Times than it did in like the school library journals,
which did, which didn't bum me out,
but it was just sort of interesting.
So yes to that.
And the book about Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Birut?
Galdikas it specifically targeted at
the 10 to 12 year old girl audience.
So I needed a lot of help from my editors to like do that.
Because I've never written, I, it's, it's
a very different type of storytelling.
I, I handed in the first draft to
Calista and she said, that's very nice.
I think you've got the story structure great and all the
facts are down and it looks good, where's the emotion?
And the nuclear engineer in me said emotion?
[Laughter] What do you mean?
And she said, remember your audience.
The, these are kids that are, you know, these are kids.
And one of the main ways they, they're just approaching
adulthood, and they're feeling stuff really strongly.
And it's almost overwhelming for
that 10 to 12 year old age range.
And sort of, yeah I guess I remember
that sort of thing going on.
So she, she has helped me rework
that to better fit the audience.
I, I'm, I'm not, I'm probably not the
greatest person to be doing this though.
Hence the emotion, sort of response.
But yeah, we're, we're definitely
hoping for that in the very next book.
The Alan Turing book is very much
not going to be for young kids.
There's you know as, as they say in
the PG-13 movies, adult themes to it.
It, it's a PG-13 book basically, but PG-13 does not mean 10.
Especially in the comics.
Yes.
>> My question is, given the standard graphic novel's
audience, do you ever feel doubt that sometimes
instead of interesting people in science,
people might find the scientists
geekier - I mean kids - and...
>> Jim Ottaviani: I don't worry that this will make people
thing they're geekier, because I look at the
depiction of scientist in most other popular media,
and feel pretty good about the way, I, I'm sorry, that
really sounds horribly arrogant, but when
you look at the stereotypical scientist,
I mean I love the big bang theory,
that's a very entertaining show.
But I don't think it's putting scientists in the best light.
And I think I have more latitude to do things a little bit
more balanced and show you know Feynman
as a truly happy family man for instance.
And someone who was interested in art and
interested in music and all those things.
So I hope it's not having an affect counter to my purpose.
I don't really know.
Not enough data.
We, we need to commission a study or something.
Anybody, yeah I haven't looked over this way in a while.
And with a Feynman t-shirt so you got to...
>> Yeah that was a, what's your favorite
Feynman quote in What's Your Story?
This one's mine.
>> Jim Ottaviani: My favorite Feynman quote.
>> I didn't mean to put you on the spot.
>> Jim Ottaviani: Yeah you did.
[Laughter] But, I don't think I can do it.
There are so many.
I mean I, I included a great number of them in this.
And actually we didn't, we didn't, I sometimes, when, when
we don't have nice video like Roxanne was able
to provide I run a slide show in front of this.
And maybe it's the one, and it's too long a quote for me to
remember exactly, but it's about him as he's lecturing
about quantum electrodynamics to a popular audience
and say I can see you shaking your
head and saying I don't understand.
I can see you shaking your head saying I don't like it.
Tough. I don't understand it either.
I don't like it either.
But that's the way nature is.
And I think that's a really good summation, at least.
It may not be the best Feynman quote, because you know I'll
get, I'll, I'll be walking home, back to the hotel
room tonight and I'll, the thing I should have said.
>> The taxi driver will tell you...
>> Jim Ottaviani: [Laughter] Bravo.
Yes. Sir.
>> I guess my question is, Feynman's a communicator, and he
often depicts different points of view which is
part of the reason why he was so great I think.
>> Jim Ottaviani: Yes.
>> [Crosstalk] scientific pursuits.
So I guess my, my question would be would you, does your
graphic novel actually convey that
sense of Feynman to the reader?
That he was that kind of extravagant reader who
looks at things from different perspectives?
>> Jim Ottaviani: I hope so. I hope so.
The scenes about, the scenes where we show Feynman initially
presenting his ideas on, on QED and the
skepticism and difficulty that other physicists had
with wrapping their heads around the way Feynman did it,
because it was so different from the way Schwinger
and Tomonaga the two people who shared the,
the Nobel Prize with Feynman for this, for
these discoveries, very different formulation.
It turns that we, that Feynman's is the one that
is very commonly used now because it's so powerful.
And I think because his visual.
So I hope so.
Like I said, but that's, I'm, you know
I'm sort of soaking in it at this point.
And I can't tell whether, whether it's good or bad.
Way, yeah way in the back, I saw, oh,
people are pointing at this person to, okay.
>> How has the process of writing this novel expanded your
understanding of Feynman, the person,
in relation to Feynman as a physicist?
>> Jim Ottaviani: The process of writing, I think, I think I
described it a little bit when, when we
were talking about heroes and villains sort
of thing and, and learning to sympathize with folks.
Well let, let me sort of hark back to the research stage and
getting to go into the basement of Caltech
where Feynman's papers actually are.
In reading some of his original letters, and some, you know,
some very personal things, it, Feynman
has sort of achieved this God-like status.
Especially among physicists, but Freeman Dyson just argued
in an article he wrote, that maybe
among the general population as well.
And I feel that way about him, I, I think he was, I
can't remember and Sasha maybe you, you can remember.
Who said about Feynman that he was not an ordinary genius?
>> Sasha: I don't remember that.
>> Jim Ottaviani: Okay.
So, so, so physicists who knew him, let's pretend
that it's John Wheeler, his thesis advisor said this.
It's probably not true.
But there, there are geniuses that you know, and you imagine
yourself, if I just worked a little harder was just
a little bit brighter, a little bit more focused,
had a little bit clearer vision of where
I wanted to go, I could be that person.
And then there's Feynman.
Which, you know, nobody could see how to make
the leap to some of the things that he did.
Given that he was that type of person, the fact that he
started to feel very real, very human, very flawed in, in
a number of ways, I think that's the most important change
of my perspective is he really got humanized, he became much
more human the more I learned about him, and
the more I admired about what he'd accomplished.
So they weren't mutually exclusive.
I, I admired him more and he became more human.
And that, I think that's really cool.
>> Apparently Hans Bethe.
>> Jim Ottaviani: Hans Bethe?
Thank you.
Hans Bethe said that about Feynman.
That he was not an ordinary genius.
Roxanne would you like me call on someone in particular?
>> Roxanne Bogucka: I think, I think her.
>> Jim Ottaviani: Okay.
>> Roxanne Bogucka: How about her?
Hi.
>> Hi. I was wondering what does
the research process look like.
What kind of sources do you look at.
>> Jim Ottaviani: Yes.
>> And how long does that take you to develop that?
>> Jim Ottaviani: Yeah.
So I've, the, the research process looks very much like what
you were taught, maybe in high
school, or now, now in college.
It's mostly reading a lot of books, but with Feynman there
was a fair, he's a fairly well documented
guy, both by himself and by others
because he was an interesting person to
know so people liked to write about him.
So there was also a fair amount of, of video to
look at, not dramatizations of his life so much.
In fact I would specifically want to avoid those things so
that I could tell the story without
stealing from somebody else inadvertently.
But watching him lecture to see his physical style, to see
the way he dressed was important and
we cheated in one significant way
on the way he was dressed and we found this out later.
We didn't realize it at the time.
So I'm going to do a little digression
here to answering your question.
Leyland depicted Feynman all the way
through the book with his sleeves rolled up.
And when Carl Feynman saw the images, the final images, he
goes, "You know my dad really never
had his sleeves rolled up at all.
Go back and look at the reference photos."
And we looked, it's like ugh, you're right.
And then Leyland is like you are not going to make
me redraw 260 pages to roll down the cuffs right?
[Laughter] And we made our peace
with this akin to superhero costume.
Feynman's costume is his sleeves are rolled up because he's
a guy who dives in hands first and really gets,
gets them dirty and, and works physically.
So end of digression.
Research process.
Reading a lot of books, watching videos to get
his mannerisms and get his speech patterns down.
Listening to a lot of audio.
But the, the most precious stuff is talking
to people like Ralph Latten who knew him well.
And then going to those original papers in the archives to
see the things that didn't make it
into some of the other published books.
My favorite bit was that speech that I showed very early on,
his second Nobel Prize speech is
what I call it, to his high school.
I've never seen that published before.
And there are gems in there.
And they are particularly great because, because he talks
about his high school career, which he
didn't do in any of his other books.
So I learned lots of new and interesting
names and new and interesting facts.
And it was just a fun speech to go.
So if, if you're going to do something like this, see if you
can dive into the primary sources as soon, as soon
as you, you feel ready to, or if you can find them,
because that's where the stuff that will set it just
a little bit apart from say the other biographies.
Yeah. I have time for one more, then you've got to pick.
[Laughter] You made me.
>> Roxanne Bogucka: Paddy's Irish Pub back there.
>> I was just going to ask, is there anything you found out
about Feynman while you were researching this that really
surprised you, like blew you away or anything like that?
>> Jim Ottaviani: I was surprised, I'm not going to give
you, I'm not going to give the, the full answer here
because this is stuff that we left out of the book.
But I was surprised at some of the letters he saved.
>> Okay.
>> Jim Ottaviani: And, and that he
actually donated to the archives.
So that, that, that means the challenge to you is to, to now
go the Caltech archives and look
through his personal correspondence
and see what was in there that, that surprised me.
>> All right.
>> Jim Ottaviani: But he kept a lot of stuff.
It's, it's actually a little bit too bad these days that we
communicate so, so readily and so frequently
in [inaudible] ways, texting, email, twitter,
I don't think a lot of people are saving that stuff.
So the, the future me's are going to
have a tougher time doing research.
I guess it's last call.
[Laughter]
[ Applause ]
So thank you very much.
