Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr's Life, Discoveries, and the Century He Shaped

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.

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.

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.

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].